Research Shows Q4 2022 Was The Worst Period for CPU Sales on Record!

Compared to the misery of 2020-2021, last year was undoubtedly better in terms of general computer hardware availability. No, prices didn’t fall anywhere near as quickly as they climbed, but at least most CPUs and graphics card models were (somewhat) available to purchase without too much difficulty on the consumers’ part. – Despite this improvement in stock, however, the response from the community wasn’t exactly one of exuberant and gleeful spending!

Put simply, despite the fact that tech products were (sort of) back on retail shelves, a lot of people still didn’t buy anything. And I’ll freely concede that I was one of these. I’ve “needed” a new graphics card for a long time now (well, that’s what I tell my wife at least) and I’ve still yet to pull the trigger on anything despite now having a plethora of models to choose from.

Just in case this consumer apathy needed hammering home, however, following a report via TechSpot, retail research has revealed that Q4 2022 was the worst period on record (going back to 1994) in terms of CPU sales. – This is despite the fact that the quarter saw the initial release of both the AMD Ryzen 7000 and Intel Raptor Lake series of processors!

CPU Sales Fell to Record Low in Q4 2022!

We should note that while this news is quite surprising, this isn’t the first time that CPU sales hit a new low in 2022. Q2 2022 also saw a massive slump and while things did pick up a bit in Q3, the end-of-year period of processor sales fell to a brand-new record low! – So, undoubtedly bad news for both Intel and AMD, albeit the latter will possibly be slightly more cheerful since the research does seem to indicate that they did increase their overall market share during this period (albeit, not by a massive margin).

As noted above though, I believe that 2022 did see a huge swell of apathy from the PC hardware community. After 2 years of not being able to get anything, at least, not at reasonable prices (more in regard to GPUs than CPUs I should add), when the stock did start to improve we didn’t rush out to get our long-overdue upgrade. – If anything, I think it has taught us to be patient, more considerate, and even less impulsive in our purchases.

Then again, a global cost-of-living crisis isn’t exactly giving us much spare change these days. Maybe it’s more to do with people simply accepting that while their current hardware isn’t as good as it once was, it is perhaps still good enough to last a little longer yet.

What do you think though? – Let us know in the comments!