What Happened to High End Desktop (HEDT) Processors?

For several years, both AMD and Intel have offered five general categories of CPUs: Mobile, Consumer Desktop, High-End Desktop, Server, and Workstation. Something strange has been happening to the middle segment, though: HEDT processors are disappearing!

State of the CPU

Earlier this year I wrote about AMD’s comeback, as their processors were being included in more than half of the workstations we sold. It has been a few months now, marked by a lot of hardware shortages in this industry, so I wanted to revisit the situation and look at some additional metrics regarding CPU sales here at Puget Systems.

AMD – Return of the King?

Back in 2015, we quietly dropped AMD processor options from our workstations. At the time, I wrote a post explaining what had happened, and ended it with a hope that AMD would come back someday with a more competitive CPU. That did, in fact, happen – and over the last couple of years we have seen them surge back into our product line with a vengeance!

Cool New Cooler

Here are Puget Systems our product qualification team is constantly looking at new components to make our workstations better. Noctua recently released their NH-U12A, which is similar to the NH-U12S we have been using in many of our builds… but actually is more than it seems, in multiple ways. Here is an inside look at how we evaluated this new cooler, and how it will change the systems we build going forward.