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AMD, Transmeta Edge Up In Market Share
prostoalex writes "The new Mercury Research report on the microprocessor market is out, and it looks like the little guys are gaining ground. AMD now owns 15.7% of the market, instead of 15.6% a year ago, while Transmeta and other manufacturers went from 1.7% to 1.8% in a single year. Intel owns 82.5% of the market instead of 82.8% a year ago. News.com.com also notices: 'The competition between the two companies will shift into high gear over the remainder of the year. On Sept. 23, AMD will release the Athlon64, a new desktop chip that can run 32-bit and 64-bit software.'"
I guess that means that nothing really changed. That is little guys at least stay in game. Which is probably good news at the moment.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
This is what gets me about Transmeta, saying that they increase their share when in a category called "other" which increases 0.1% means that Transmeta is up...
How ? Transmeta don't have enough sales to get in a category of their own, they may have DECREASED their marketshare but another minor player could of increased theirs thus making the overall sector go up.
I know that here at Slashdot we must all bow to the altar of Transmeta because their processor approach is all open sourced and they own no patents and follow the OSS way so purely... oh wait they don't ? You mean they do have patents and they don't release their architecture ? Oh it must be because Linux is their primary OS... nope again. No its because they gave Linus a job.
The story here is that Intel remain the massive player, AMD has made some minor in-roads but is still not gaining marketshare in the way they would really like, and that the figures actually represent and quarter on quarter DROP in sales percentage for AMD.
In otherwords a way to say this is that AMD have LOST nearly 1% of share over 3 months which isn't so positive.
But hey, if we can bash Intel and bump Transmeta why let the facts get in the way.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
As soon as users stop caring about their software investments.
It could be much better to take an advanced RISC core (like PPC) and add an additional (legacy) instruction decode unit to it (anyway, x86 does instruction recoding internally). Simply adding stupid extensions to the old instruction set is not the best policy for anybody.
I'm a mac user and all but really, you will probably be ablet o get a Athlon 64 at the same time you can walk into a apple store and buy a G5.
Wait, what market are we talking about?
Oh, right: "Mercury's numbers include so-called x86 processors shipped for inclusion in desktops, notebooks, servers and Xboxes."
So, these numbers don't tell us anything about the chips in Macs, Suns, SGIs, mainframes, Crays, Playstations, Palms, VCRs, cars, vaccuum cleaners, or toaster ovens. Just that Wintel stuff.
(warning: I'm just tossing this out from memory without doing any double-checking on it first, so read with caution and pay attention to replies.)
I believe that's basically what they're already doing.
If I understood what I read correctly, the "X86" CPUs on the market aren't really X86 CPUs anymore. Instead, they are essentially a super-fast hardware emulator of an instruction set. The real instruction set of these chips doesn't resemble X86 *at all*; the chip decodes on the fly from the X86 macro-ops down to the chip's native micro-ops, which are smaller and simpler and easier to track when running in parallel across several execution units.
That's part of why most software emulation is so slow -- you are in essence comparing generalized software solutions to incredibly well-engineered hardware solutions.
If we had a different instruction set, would we really benefit? For the vast majority of us, even the Slashdot crowd, no. The compiler guys would probably like it a lot, but very few programmers work in anything lower than C. The actual "machine language" is mostly unimportant. And it's not even REALLY the machine language of the chip anymore!
Even assembly coders, these days, are writing in a form of interpreted language. The "bare metal" guys aren't REALLY at the bare metal anymore; even they are working at a level of abstraction.
Intel actually is TRYING to break from x86 with the Itanium line, they invested Billions and billions of dollars to do so. They had a hardware x86 emultator tacked on that is so anemic that it is outperformed by a chip two generations older at the same clock speed (the P3 running at Itanium speeds trounces it for legacy 32bit code), throw in the fact that it is WAY behind the current 32bit chips in clock speed and you get a not-so-impressive product if the majority of your code is legacy. Then they decided their software tech was good enough that they could get better performance out of a software translator, they did, but only about 30% faster average then the hadware unit, still too slow. Compare this to AMD with the Athlon64/Opteron which runs 32bit code at least as fast clock for clock as the previous generation (ususally faster due to larger cache), and is running at about the same clock speeds. On the software emulation as part of a platform switch, it has been done twice, once with Apple and the 68k->PPC transition (quite sucessfull), and once by DEC and the Alpha team with FX!32 which was a software translation layer that would dynamically recompile x86 NT4 programs to native Alpha code, it didn't work all that well despite the Apha being vastly superior to anything Intel made at the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ok, these are, technically, gains in marketshare for AMD and Transmeta, but they're so small that they are statistically insignificant, aren't they? Why is this article not saying that marketshare is more or less stagnant?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That kinda depends. If the data is taken from door to door, yeah. Bu if it's taken from sales records, no.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Well so far Intel is 82.5% right with their strategy, but that's down from being 82.7% right a year ago.
But speaking of benchmarketing, it would be REALLY fun to see some sort of CPU shootout, *all done with gcc*. Most of us either buy applications, or compile them ourselves, using gcc.
Really, Spec means very little to us. Quake, Unreal, etc fps are meaningful to those of us that play those games. To the Linux crowd, at home, business, and universities, gcc is how we get executables.
Apple recently got a black eye for using gcc for benchmarking, but perhaps erroneously. Intel does wonders on benchmarks, but I hear rumblings that they have Spec-tuned compilers that may not yield results as good on things that don't look like Spec.
When the masses, such as we are, compile, we use gcc. (I agree that most masses just buy Quake, Unreal, Photoshop, etc.) But I argue that a small subset compiles, and a smaller subset yet forks over for commercial compilers.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
call it me being cheap but i can't wait for AMD to release 64bit procs to the desktop. why? cause after a quarter or 2, the cost of AthlonXP's will drop and i'll have a cheaper chip to drop in my mobo.
that being said, 64bit processing must be good for desktops or why would apple have gone with it? the fact that they run a BSD based os is a Good Thing(TM) because we already know BSD's will support 64bit procs already (and winders has no plans to support it till longhorn, IIRC) such that open source will be a better option for the people out there that just have to have the latest and gratest. i see the 64 bit processors as an advantage to people doing things like multimedia or 3d stuff (pixar moved to g5's, didn't they?). developers might like it but it'd be silly to develop on a 64bit machine when the target market is all 32 bit machines. i dunno, bigger is better, it's a step forward, and it might be one of those things we have to see to realise how great it is. (i.e. win2k _actually_ being a better os than it's predecesors, despite initial hiccups)
-PsychoI3oy
mmm freeBSDelicious.
So, even on sales figures, there are sampling effects.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.