The topic of AMD versus Intel may not spoil Thanksgiving family gatherings in the same way that bringing up politics or religion does, but it is a hot topic among the tech-savvy. In other words, hearing Uncle Bob tell Aunt Ethel that AMD makes better chips than Intel, or vice versa, is not likely to make you toss your turkey wings across the table or intentionally flip your gravy boat. If you would like to put this theory to the test, please share the latest data from Mercury Researcher at your next family event.

Mercury Research is one of the largest CPU analyst firms and is often quoted by companies like AMD and Intel. This time, AMD, along with industry analyst Patrick Moorhead, shared Mercury Researcher's newly released Q4 2019 data.

When the numbers are condensed and extrapolated, AMD continues to outpace Intel. A closer look shows that AMD is closing the gap in all segments, but none larger than mobile.

"Thanks to strong new processors launched in Q4, including the Ryzen 9 3950X and the 3rd generation Threadripper family, desktop excluding IoT also increased, with AMD's share rising 0.3 points QoQ and 2.4 points YoY to 18.3 percent AMD's share increased 0.3 percentage points sequentially and 2.4 percentage points year over year to 18.3%," AMD said in a statement.

One thing worth noting about these gains is that they continue three years after Zen's initial announcement. These numbers confirm how solid a foothold AMD has recently gained. Intel still has the upper hand (and is having a record year in terms of revenue), but this is in some ways reminiscent of the browser wars. Internet Explorer looked like an insurmountable lead until Firefox, and then Chrome, began to chip away.

While not an apples-to-apples comparison, it will be interesting to see AMD chip away at its much larger rivals.

This is not just in the market report; on Amazon, eight of the top 10 best-selling CPUs are Ryzen processors. Here's the breakdown:

Gaming plays a role here, too, as Dean McCarron of Mercury Research told our friends at TomsHardware that AMD and Intel desktop CPU shipments are "strong increase due to "high-end gaming CPU demand," with AMD benefiting primarily from the Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) series and Intel rising as it addressed entry-level CPU supply issues in the previous quarter. However, AMD's Q4 growth was lower than in the past two years.

It will also be interesting to see how the next few months, and 2020 as a whole, unfold; AMD and its hardware partners are preparing to launch notebooks with Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs, and on the desktop, Zen 3 processors are expected later this year Zen 3 processors are expected to arrive later this year. Intel, meanwhile, is preparing to launch a new iteration of its 14nm node (Comet Lake-S) and expects to finally ship 10nm desktop CPUs by the end of the year.

As a caveat to all of this, AMD's progress against Intel in market share is in a few discrete categories. Overall, AMD's x86 market share fell back 0.9 percentage points to 14.2% (though this is still a 0.9% increase for the full year). This was due to a decline in the IoT/semi-custom segment, which was directly attributable to a slowdown in console shipments. However, shipments should pick up again this year, as both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have AMD hardware built in.