The first few months of 2021 were very big for AMD and Intel, with the first three months of 2021 seeing the biggest growth in CPU shipments in a quarter century, second only to the final moments of 2020 in raw volume, according to a recent report from Mercury Research The company's sales in the first three months of 2021 were the second largest in a quarter century.

It will probably surprise you to learn that Intel gained a touch in overall x86 market share in the first quarter of 2021, while AMD reportedly lost. However, Intel gained 1% and AMD lost only 1%. Either way, it is far from a significant gain.

Mercury Research attributes the increase to Chipzilla's budget chip shipments, which it says is in line with other recent figures from the tech giant.

However, while Intel has gained market share in mobile processors, it has lost slightly in desktops; despite some difficulty in sourcing top-of-the-line chips like the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, AMD has long been a major player in the Intel processors have dominated the market for a long time.

AMD reported huge earnings in its last earnings release, which would go a long way to explaining the shift toward high-end processors with higher average selling prices in the first quarter. [But perhaps the biggest win for AMD was a 1.8% QoQ and 3.8% YoY increase in server market share. This means that Epyc processors are selling extremely well against Intel's Xeon chips, the market in which AMD is most eager to gain a foothold.

Data centers are not as fickle as we game users.

While 1.8% may seem like a paltry figure, it represents a great many server chips. In fact, as Intel's server sales declined, AMD gained its highest single quarter market share since 2006, during the Opteron era.

With demand soaring into outer space and showing little sign of slowing down, now is clearly a good time for the chip manufacturing business. Unfortunately, however, it is not so good for us gamers, because as soon as demand returns, inventories are often depleted and sold for a profit. At least it is primarily graphics cards and not all CPUs. Still, it is possible to get the best CPU for gaming.