Puget Systems Hardware Trends of 2024

Introduction

For many years now, we have published a series of “Hardware Trend” articles looking at the overall sales trends for various components within our workstations. The ways we have compiled and compared the data have shifted a bit over the years, but today we want to continue this series and look at how our CPU, GPU, RAM, OS, and storage sales changed between 2021 and the end of 2024. If you would like to check out the old articles, they are available here: Hardware Trends of 2021, Puget Systems Hardware Trends of 2022, and Puget Systems Hardware Trends of 2023.

In some ways, 2024 was a continuation of what we saw in 2023, but in others, there were major shifts in the industry that resulted in significant changes to the hardware used in our systems. A portion of this was caused by new hardware launched in 2024 (and at the tail-end of 2023), including:

• Intel Core™ 14th Gen (Q4 2023)
• AMD Threadripper™ 7000 (Q4 2023)
• AMD Threadripper™ PRO 7000WX (Q4 2023)
• NVIDIA RTX™ Ada Generation (Q1 2024)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 40 SUPER Series (Q1 2024)
• AMD Ryzen™ 9000 (Q3 2024)
• Intel Xeon™ W-2500/3500 Series (Q3 2024)
• Intel Core™ Ultra 200S (Q4 2024)
• AMD Ryzen™ 9800X3D (Q4 2024)
• Intel Arc™ B580 (Q4 2024)

This is quite a few product releases in a relatively short period, but most were straightforward generational updates that didn’t significantly impact what type of hardware works best for various workflows. On the other hand, there were other major events in 2024, such as the instability issues with Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen processors that, in some cases, had a much greater impact than any single hardware launch.

About our Data

Before we look at our sales data, we want to clarify that it represents our workstation sales at Puget Systems and is not indicative of the computer industry at large.

We focus on high-end workflows for content creation, engineering, and scientific computing, often with very different priorities than gaming or general home/office systems. This means that what we use in our systems can be very different from the “average” workstation, and even more so compared to a DIY gaming system. We are also constantly growing and evolving as a company, targeting different industries and workflows as time passes, which can cause a shift in the components we sell over time.

The data in this article is pulled from our desktop workstation and rackstation sales but does not include our mobile workstation (laptop) or server lines. Both of those have very different hardware compared to our more typical workstations and are generally not as interesting because the hardware we use is very targeted (laptops) or extremely workflow-specific (servers). In future reports, we may include data from those product families, but for now, we are limiting it to our desktop & rackmount workstation systems.

We also want to clarify that this data is pulled on a per-order basis, rather than per-system. A good percentage of our sales are for multiple units at a time, but reporting on a per-system basis introduces quite a bit of noise to the data in a way that isn’t helpful or useful. For example, we typically sell a significant amount more systems with AMD Threadripper than Intel Xeon W, but we could have a single order for a large number of systems using Intel Xeon W processors that throw that ratio off for a short time period. Those kinds of atypical sales are most often for a very specific or niche workflow, and we have found it more useful to count those systems as a single order for this type of report, rather than allowing a single large quantity order from skewing the data.

The sample size of our data is counted in multiple thousands of orders per year. Rather than giving raw unit counts, we will present the results in terms of the percentage of our sales for that specific hardware and class of product.

With these points in mind, let’s jump into the interesting part of this post!

CPU (Processor)

Starting off with the CPUs used in our workstation, we are first going to show the total order ratio between AMD and Intel CPUs, then hone in on two specific groups: “Client” processors (including AMD Ryzen and Intel Core), and “Workstation” processors (AMD Threadripper/Threadripper PRO and Intel Xeon W). The term “Client” is a bit of a misnomer these days, as Ryzen and Core CPUs are commonly used in workstations, but we wanted to separate out these classes of processors since they have very different capabilities and price points. But to start, let’s look at our overall AMD vs Intel numbers:

Our overall sales divide between AMD and Intel has been relatively close for quite a while, with Intel having a slightly higher market share between 2022 and the first half of 2024. As we will show in a bit, this is mostly due to Intel’s Core family of processors, which have some advantages in the M&E (media and entertainment) space, which is one of our primary target markets.

However, this has been steadily changing throughout 2024. In Q3, AMD and Intel were almost an exact 50/50 split, and in Q4, AMD took the lead in terms of total sales in our workstations for the first time in nearly three years (since Q1 of 2022). Exactly why this shift happened is best explained by breaking down our sales into the “Client” and “Workstation” CPU segments.

Client CPU sales are very interesting to look at over the last few years, because back in 2021, AMD Ryzen held the majority of CPU sales in this segment. However, at the end of 2021, Intel released their Intel Core 12th Gen processor family, which, as we showed in our review at the time, catapulted Intel in front of AMD for a wide variety of the workflows we target. This resulted in a very quick flip of Intel and AMD sales in our workstations, and Intel continued to grow its market share with the launch of its Core 13th Gen and 14th Gen processors.

However, in the second half of 2024, things have been quickly shifting back towards AMD. Intel Core is still used in most of our systems of this class, but AMD Ryzen has been steadily gaining ground. In Q4 of 2024, AMD accounted for just shy of 40% of our client CPU sales, the highest it has been since early 2022. The reasoning behind this is multi-faceted, but contributing factors were the AMD Ryzen 9000 launch in Q3 2024, the somewhat lackluster Intel Core Ultra 200S launch, and the messy Intel Core 13/14th Gen instability issues that were covered throughout a good portion of 2024. Our customers have been more isolated from those problems than the average user due to the way we configure our systems, as we detailed in our Puget Systems’ Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues blog post, but it was a very real issue that contributed to us changing a number of our hardware recommendations.

While Intel has held a firm lead for client CPUs in our systems over the last few years and is still clinging on to its majority at the end of 2024, AMD has long had an even stronger lead in the “Workstation” processor segment.

As you can see in the chart above, our sales of AMD CPUs over the last few years appear a bit messy. AMD had a period of time when it dropped the “Threadripper” line entirely and only had “Threadripper PRO.” However, since the Threadripper 7000 and Threadripper PRO 7000WX series launch at the end of 2023, we once again have both product families available.

Between AMD Threadripper and Threadripper PRO, we saw almost an exact 50/50 split throughout 2024, with Threadripper PRO only ending up with a slight 2% lead. These two product families accounted for almost 90% of our workstation CPU sales in 2024, with Intel Xeon W only being used in about 10% of the orders for this class of system.

GPU (Video Card)

Because we focus so heavily on content creation, engineering, and scientific computing workflows, we almost exclusively use NVIDIA GPUs in our workstations. That is something we hope changes in the future, since competition is always better for the consumer, but for now, NVIDIA has the advantage in the majority of applications our customers use.

While that means we don’t have any real numbers for NVIDIA versus AMD (or Intel), we can look at how GPU sales break down between NVIDIA’s consumer-oriented GeForce line and their professional RTX (formerly Quadro) line.

Overall, 2024 was mostly about the same as 2023 and 2022, with the NVIDIA GeForce GPUs accounting for roughly 80% of our overall GPU sales for the year. NVIDIA’s professional RTX line got a small boost at the end of 2023 with the launch of their “Ada Generation” series of cards, but that ended up being a short-term blip rather than a long-term trend.

We don’t expect GeForce and RTX cards to have parity in our workstations any time soon, but it is interesting to see that even with the growth of industries that benefit from the RTX cards – like AI/ML, virtual production, scientific computing, etc – our ratio between consumer and professional GPUs has been largely static for multiple years. Even as explosive as those segments have been recently, they are still only a small portion of the workstations we sell. The story would likely be different if we included server sales, since those are often equipped with multiple professional and even datacenter-class GPUs (and almost never with consumer-grade video cards).

OS (Operating System)

While not hardware, we also wanted to include the OS in this post, as the move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 has historically been very interesting.

Even though Windows 11 launched at the end of 2021, it took a while for heavy adoption to take place. In fact, due to some early launch issues, it wasn’t until the end of July 2022 that application support was good enough that we were comfortable making Windows 11 the default option on most of our systems.

You can clearly see these two milestones on the chart above. Slow adoption of Windows 11 starting at the end of 2021, with a sharp increase around Q3 of 2022 as we became confident in the OS for the workflows we target. Even then, however, it wasn’t until Q4 of 2022 that Windows 11 passed Windows 10 as the most common OS used on our systems.

Since then, Windows 11 use has grown and, as of the end of 2024, is used on about 90% of the workstation orders we receive. Windows 10 held on much longer than we anticipated, although this is likely the last time we will talk about Windows 10 vs. Windows 11, as we have recently officially stopped offering Windows 10 as a downgrade option from Windows 11.

On the Linux side, we have been seeing a slow but steady increase in order sales since 2021. Linux is still only at 10% overall on the workstation side, although the Windows/Linux ratio is almost exactly flipped on our server-class sales.

Storage

In previous years, we examined how our sales numbers for NVMe, SATA SSD, and platter drives changed over time. However, NVMe drives have become so prevalent that there really isn’t anything interesting to see on a chart. Simply put, NVMe drives account for 100% of our primary OS/application drives and about 90% of our secondary storage drives. We still use some SATA SSDs for those looking for massive local storage, although platter drives have pretty much disappeared outside of niche use cases in our workstations.

Total storage capacity is also fairly messy to look at since the amount of total storage people need varies massively depending on their specific workflow. However, since we tend to use multi-drive setups (primary OS/application, secondary storage, tertiary cache, etc.), the one thing that is fairly consistent is the capacity of the primary drive that is used for the OS and application (as well as random downloads/documents). And looking at this is very interesting!

For all of 2024, the average size of the drive used in our workstations was just over 2 TB. This has been growing steadily since 2021, when a 1 TB average was more the norm.

However, that doesn’t mean that 2 TB drives are the most common capacity used in our workstations for the primary drive (averages don’t work like that). To see the most common versus the average, we can break our sales down based on the primary drive capacity.

In the above chart, we did a little bit of rounding to make things simpler. For example, we have at times sold drives marked as 512 GB, and others as 500 GB. Since 12 GB doesn’t really change the story, we marked both of those as 500 GB. With that said, we actually don’t use 500 GB drives at all as of late 2023, so we didn’t have a single sale in 2024 at that capacity.

The most common capacity for our primary drives is 1 TB, with about 45% of our sales in 2024. 2 TB has been steadily gaining ground, however, and we expect it to reach parity with 1 TB sometime in 2025. The use of 4 TB NVMe drives has also been growing steadily since they became available in 2022, and even massive 8 TB drives (which are much more common as secondary storage drives) saw a small amount of use in 2024 as a primary drive.

RAM (System Memory)

New this year, we wanted to examine the RAM sales in our workstations. Similar to storage, we will first examine the average RAM capacity used and then dial in on exact sales ratios for the different total capacities.

Total RAM capacity in our workstations has been steadily growing for quite a while, from an average of approximately 80 GB at the start of 2021 to just under 150 GB in 2024. This is due to multiple factors including price, growing application/workflow RAM requirements, and the availability of larger-capacity modules.

However, just like with storage, averages like this can sometimes be thrown off due to a relatively small number of sales for extremely high capacities like 512 GB or 768 GB. So let’s break things down by specific RAM capacities as well:

Memory is much messier than storage since there is a wider range of possible capacities. Even without mixing individual module sizes, which we don’t recommend doing, there are still 9 different total capacities we used in 2024. It has not always been like this! For a long time, all RAM sticks came in powers of 2: 16, 32, and 64 GB, for example. With DDR5, however, manufacturers are producing new stick sizes like 24 and 48 GB. These new stick sizes are great for increasing the total RAM capacity possible, as well as giving more granularity, introducing new total capacities like 96 and 192 GB that were previously not possible in a reliable manner.

However, even with the new stick sizes, 64 and 128 GB were the most common total capacities used in our workstations for 2024. 128 GB is the most common, but it has been steadily dropping through the course of the year. It is mostly being cannibalized by the new 96 GB and 192 GB total capacities, both of which finished 2024 at about 10% of our system sales. This makes complete sense as, in the past, 128 GB was overkill for some users – and not quite enough for others.

On the other hand, 256 GB has been slowly growing over several years and will likely hit 20% of our workstation sales sometime in 2025. This is a very common capacity for our AMD Threadripper and Threadripper PRO systems, and it will be interesting to see if the relatively new 384 GB total capacity (4x 96 GB sticks) will halt its growth like 96 and 192 GB did for 128 GB.

At the very large capacities, 512 GB has been stable for several years at just 5% of our sales, and 768 GB hasn’t caught on much. That is another relatively new capacity, so it will be interesting to see if that size grows in 2025 or if the high cost is simply too much for more than a handful of users.

Conclusion

In 2024, we had a few shake-ups for the hardware used in our workstations. The most significant was AMD passing Intel in total CPU sales per quarter for the first time in nearly three years. Intel Core is still managing to hang on with a 60% share in the “client”-class of CPUs, but AMD is steadily gaining ground in that segment while maintaining their massive 90% lead for “workstation”-class processors.

Beyond CPUs, our distribution between NVIDIA GeForce and NVIDIA RTX GPUs was the same as it has been for years: roughly an 80/20 split. For operating systems, Windows 11 continued to supplant Windows 10 – and we may finally be able to stop talking about Windows 10 vs. Windows 11 since we recently dropped Windows 10 as an option on our systems.

For storage and RAM, the story is simply that users want more and more as time goes on. The average size of primary OS/application drives in our workstations increased by nearly 25% compared to 2023 and averaged just over 2 TB in 2024. Total RAM capacity saw a smaller growth of only 10%, going from an average of 135 GB in 2023 to 150 GB in 2024.

The question now is how 2025 is going to shape up. Will AMD’s CPU sales trend continue, allowing them to take the lead for both client- and workstation-class processors? And how will total RAM capacity shake out with the new 48GB RAM stick size? Not to mention how different industries and workflows will continue to change with the introduction of new technologies like AI. We will have to wait and see!