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AMD Beats Intel in CPU Sales
glockenspieler writes "As reported by Ars Technica, for the week ending April 24th, AMD accounted for 52% of desktop CPU sales. Granted its just one week but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum in the desktop market. So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?"
But critics point out that:
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Just a clarification for the editor who missed something HUGE:
AMD outsold Intel in RETAIL desktop sales. Dell is obviously not retail. Here's a better read.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Wouldn't the true definition of outlier be if AMD were to sell some absurd percentage of chips (i.e. 95%)?
-m
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# Modus Ponens
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When will they carry AMD? C'mon. This came out over a month ago.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
How much you wanna bet that 25% of the sales were people buying 2200+'s or the likes, and overclocking to 3100+?
I know I was one of them.
That factor alone may be why AMD was on top.
-Imidazole2
The story is incorrect. These are only RETAIL CPUs and don't include Dell and other OEMs.
Heat comparison
Check out that "Load Temperature" chart. What's that? Intel's at the top and the Athlon's are at the bottom? Even at idle temps, the Athlon64 comes in under or even with the P4s.
AMD is a 35 year old company whose stock has never grown.
You can make money off AMD by riding the highs, but not as a long term investor.
Incorrect...this includes all PCs sold at retail channels.
"Desktop PCs with processors from Advanced Micro Devices outsold desktops based on processors from Intel in U.S. retail channels for the week ending April 24, according to research released late last week from Current Analysis. "
The very first line in the original article.
My (ugly) Shuttle SN85G4 uses an AMD64 3200+. I use it mostly for working on and running my chess program. When I first bought it I was freaked out when I did: cat
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
> Yes, AMD's chips have a lower MAXIMUM than Intel, but AMD has a problem,
> when their CPUs are idle, they still use up just as much power, and put
> out just as much heat. This is because a HALT won't do anything on an
> AMD (not without the FSB hack).
Bullshit.
This was fixed on Barton a year ago.
And all the Athlon 64's have Cool and Quiet which really drops processor use down. THIS IS NOT THROTTLING, as throttling cuts the processor speed when the processor gets too hot for the cooling solution (a problem with Intel P4s) and cuts the speed to compensate just when you most require the speed. Cool and Quiet cuts the speed when you don't require it, so general operation will be at 800MHz on a current generation A64 because most people don't use the extra power.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel.
You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house. Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time. The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth. They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing.
As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line? There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon. There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors.
There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses. AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers.
To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube). AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term.
As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia? Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA. And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is. The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
That being said, I'll also add that as far as the actual cpu goes, I have never, ever seen a faulty cpu. I work in IT, and have installed hundreds of Athlons, K6s, Pentiums (I, II, III, IV, Pro, Zeon), Cyrix, etc. Never seen a faulty one. I have however seen bad fans on heatsinks fry cpus and I have seen crappy chipsets make systems unstable. Power supplies also play a major role in system stability and durability, probably the largest role actually. My point is, when people say they go with Intel over AMD for quality, they have no idea - they simply equate a higher price with higher quality, which is wrong in my opinion. I expect that no matter what company you buy a CPU from, it will work as long as you don't overclock it. When it comes to the motherboards, power supplies, heatsinks, quality is extremely important. For example, based what I have seen, a motherboard that has an Intel chipset on it will last 10x longer than on with a via chipset on it. Same applies to AMD vs Via. I love nvidia chipets as well - but I have seem some nvidia based boards die after a single year of use - and I'm not talking about a single board, I'm talking a batch of 10 all die within 2 months of each other. These were using Antec True Power supplies, so faulty power was not a problem, and no overclocking was going on. Just a bad batch of boards - but I think that has more to do with the board manufacturer, not the chipset.
Sorry, had to post that or my head would explode.
I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but here goes my opinion:
:)
For starters, I recently graduated from UC Berkeley. My last class was CS152 where the students form their own groups and design a CPU of their own. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs152
I like good designs. I like tech where people put a lot of work into making it work better and more elegantly than is actually necessary. I admire it when a design just speaks about it's designers and says "we know our shit and we know how to do it good." And to top it off, I'm willing to pay for it....but I can't complain when it's cheap
In short, my problem with Intel is that they're no longer using good engineering to sell. They've switched to marketing bullshit.
The Pentium 4, from an architecture standpoint, is a brute force method of pushing the clock speed for no reason other than to let the marketing guys say "ooh, 3 ghz." The long pipeline is what gives it that ability. The power consumption from the extra flipflops needed to form each pipelining stage and from fliping them so fast makes those huge ass heat sinks necessary. An Intel P4 uses up more physical resources to run simply so they can try to sell more for less performance.
Take a look at the PowerPC and the Athlons. AMD's marketing-speak numbers actually reflect a generally equivalent (yeah yeah, there are always variations, but it's still generally close enough) to the P4's computation power. Sure the Athlons give out ALMOST as much heat, but they're still less than the P4. The lower clock rate helps too in making the system stable since it's easier to have gates that latch/hold correctly at slower speeds (duh.) Less radio interference. You don't need to overclock everything on the board or rely on perfectly placed wires to avoid interference. Heck, it's easier and cheaper to design almost everything else on the board and chipset because of this AND STILL GET THE SAME OR BETTER PERFORMANCE. And the PowerPCs? Looking at Apple's machines, most of them still don't have direct CPU fans. They can use the same chips in the laptops and the desktops. No "mobile" version necessary. Heck, in certain cases, a 500Mhz G4 will actually beat out a 3Ghz P4, although those cases are specialized. (like distributed.net)
All of their "innovations" which they advertise don't really mean anything. MMX was a joke even as far back as the P200s. To execute a MMX instruction, you have to do a bunch of stuff to clear out your registers before you can use the instruction. Unless you had a lot to do, you might have just wasted the gains of the instruction on the prep time since you'll probably have to commit a bunch of stuff to memory which takes a while. NetBurst (the super duper long pipeline) doesn't make your internet experience better, it just increases your instruction latency (which I admit doesn't matter much when you're clocking 3ghz) and cause your CPU to croak on a branch prediction oopsies.
There's a good reason why the current Centrino/PentiumM chipsets are based off a P3. It's because it was a more respectable design than the P4 in almost every way except marketing speak. It was more power efficient. It also had a higher IPC count. (instruction per cycle) The 1ghz P3 beat out all the 1.6-1.8ghz P4s on introduction and so they just scrapped the P3s soon after because it didn't help their marketing. What kind of company scraps the better product?
The P3, by the way, should have been named the P2a or something since all that was changed was a few instructions and the cache size. But hey, 3 sounds better than 2.
Finally, the majority of developers no longer do optimizations by hand. So the "slight processor/OS incompatibility" shouldn't ever happen since almost every compiler for x86 is aware of both processors. The instruction set is the same. If the output is the same, it doesn't matter who's processor did it as long as 1+1=2 and 0xffffffff + 0x00000001 = (either 0 or an exception or whatever was specified by the ISA) Though,