Anecdotal: Early AMD Ryzen Pre-orders Show Exceptional Demand

Anecdotal is Shrout Research’s short burst views and opinions on current events and trends based on personal experiences and accounts.

On Wednesday, February 22nd, AMD and its partner at Amazon, Newegg, and others opened pre-orders for the new Ryzen processor. This CPU family, based on the widely-anticipated Zen architecture 4+ years in the making, is rebuilt from the ground up, moving away from the less than successful Bulldozer designs.

Much is riding on the success of Zen in the consumer space and with enterprise. Though we are still months away from the release of the “Naples” server designs, Ryzen for consumers will be shipping on March 2nd. The Ryzen R7 1800X, R7 1700X and R7 1700 are available for pre-order in prices ranging from $329 to $499, with motherboards from manufacturers like ASUS spanning from under $100 to $250+.

With dwindling market share in the consumer space and most recent reports showing well under 20% for AMD, the excitement and demand for Ryzen is a welcome change for its CPU division. AMD’s marketing team is well practiced in churning up fans and communities to enthusiasm levels well beyond most other silicon providers thanks in large part to the personnel in its GPU/Radeon division. It now appears that the passage of time, and the pent-up demand for any competition to Intel in the mainstream gaming and enthusiast markets, is going to provide a boost for AMD in 2017.

Source: MarketRealist

Though we may have to wait months before getting reports from market research firms or from AMD earnings calls, we have at least some anecdotal information to share. PC Perspective is a long running hardware review and information website catering to enthusiasts and PC gamers. Through a bit of luck (being placed near the top of February 22nd Google searches for “Ryzen”) and an Amazon affiliate integration, PC Perspective had a sales day topping $300,000 in PC hardware!

From that information, and a breakdown of the specific items purchased and their categories, the following data was provided:

Though PC Perspective is just a single data point in what was likely hundreds of websites offering links to resellers for Ryzen, the sheer volume was astounding. That single day of sales was well beyond the second highest sales day for PC Perspective’s affiliate code, including and Black Friday, other hardware launches, etc. It also represents a 100x increase over the average sales per day. One day does not guarantee success for any product, but I can assuredly say now that AMD has met many users’ expectations.

(It’s worth noting that full, independent reviews of Ryzen hardware won’t be available for another 10+ days.)

Of that $300,000 in sales, more than $150,000 was not of Ryzen processors or X370/B350 motherboards. This brings us to another important point: with the exception of Intel, every other hardware vendor should be welcoming the influx in new builds. Users were buying graphics cards, memory kits, power supplies, storage and SSDs, cases and more, all in preparation to build a new PC for gaming and productivity. AMD hopes to take advantage of that trend with its upcoming Vega graphics cards but NVIDIA and its GeForce GTX cards stand to make considerable movement as well. Other vendors like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Corsair, OCZ, EVGA, and others, including accessories suppliers like Logitech, should all see some modicum of uptick in hardware sales in the coming weeks and months.

We still have a long road for Ryzen processors and the Zen architecture before anyone can claim that it is a big enough success to help redirect this ship known as AMD. However, it seems nearly impossible that the company will not immediately start taking back market share from Intel in the $250+ processor space. And for the rest of the industry that has been pushing for users to upgrade and open their wallets, the Ryzen launch appears to be giving it a jump start too.

Disclaimer: Shrout Research and PC Perspective share management and ownership.