In a nutshell: We know that AMD has gone from living in Intel's shadow to becoming a genuine rival in recent times, and a new survey illustrates this. According to the European Hardware Association (EHA), AMD's popularity has increased 50 percent over the last two years.

When asked about the next desktop processor they intended to buy, the 10,000 respondents who take part in the survey expressed a preference for AMD, with 60 percent choosing the company over Intel.

"The last three years has seen AMD gain a lot of momentum in the enthusiast segment," said EHA chairman Koen Crijns. "With the Ryzen series of CPUs, AMD has eliminated any lingering performance gaps, while offering a great price/performance ratio."

AMD has been slowly gaining favor among European PC fans. In a similar survey from 2018, 40 percent of respondents preferred AMD. That figure was up to 50 percent in another survey conducted in May this year.

"The surge in preference from 50 percent to 60 percent over recent months, can be explained by the launch of AMD's latest 3rd generation Ryzen desktop CPU", said Crijns.

AMD is also making gains when it comes to graphics cards, though Nvidia remains the dominant name by far. While 72.8 percent of those who read EHA publications would choose GeForce cards, AMD has seen its share go up 4 percent in the last six months, from 19 percent to almost 23 percent.

Additionally, the survey showed virtually everyone who preferred AMD GPUs combined them with the company's CPUs. An Intel processor/AMD graphics card combo only accounted for 2.9 percent of the results.

It's not just Europe where AMD is experiencing a popularity surge. In Amazon's US chart of best-selling CPUs, all but two of the top ten spots are occupied by AMD processors, and its CPU sales have moved ahead of Chipzilla in Japan.