The tech sector is down a bit. Intel is hemorrhaging money (opens in new tab), Google (opens in new tab), Dell (opens in new tab), and others are, well, hemorrhaging people. But when it comes to the CPU market in particular, according to Mercury Research (opens in new tab), the situation is not only bad, it is likely to be "the worst in PC market history, both in terms of volume and revenue". Ouch.

In its latest market report, Mercury reported that PC sales in 2022, excluding systems with ARM chips, were 374 million units, down 21% from the previous year. This is the worst performance in the 30 years that Mercury Research has tracked PC sales.

According to Mercury, Intel's desktop sales fell particularly sharply at the end of 2022, allowing AMD to gain market share, which is somewhat surprising given the broader scenario of the Ryzen 7000 series (open in new tab) not being a huge success.

Mercury sees AMD gaining 2.8 percentage points of market share in Q4 2022, including server CPUs and IoT chips, reaching 31.3%. For the full year, AMD achieved a 29.6% market share. Intel remains a big player. But AMD is no longer a small fish by comparison.

Nevertheless, Intel is still quite dominant in some segments, with 81.4% of the desktop CPU market and 83.6% of the mobile market at the end of 2022. Another surprise is that it is actually the mobile market that is performing the worst, with the largest YoY decline of any segment, and the largest YoY decline on record.

Anyway, what Mercury does not reveal in its figures is the PC gaming market in particular. Almost a decade ago, while the actual PC gaming market was growing like gangbusters, the overall PC market looked pretty bleak.

In other words, bad news for PCs in general does not necessarily mean doom for PC gaming. However, all signs point to a severely depressed market. What this means in the long run is not known. [Most analysts simply see the importance of computing increasing over time, given the ever more ubiquitous increase in connected devices, as well as the projected explosion in the use and impact of various AI systems.

In the short to medium term, however, and sorry to beat the same old drum, we can only hope that market conditions will drive down the price of the most important PC gaming component, the graphics card.