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?"

Comments

It has to be said.

[grub]

Netcraft confirms it: Intel is dying.

Yet another crippling bombshell hit already beleaguered Intel microprocessor community today when Ars Technica (and Netcraft) confirmed that AMD sold more processors than Intel for the week ending April 24th. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which indicated people like saving money when buying a computer this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along: Intel is collapsing in complete disarray.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Intel's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Intel faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intel because Intel is dying.Things are looking very bad for Intel. Their offices are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. Intel continues to lose market share, red ink flows like a river of blood.

The Intel development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Intel has steadily declined in market share. Intel is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intel is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. Intel continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Intel is dead.

Fact: Intel is dying

Re:It has to be said.

[swordboy]

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.

Re:It has to be said.

[asunder]

One week with 2% over in sales than Intel and you think Intel's finished? This is laughable. Once AMD beats Intel out over many months, even years, perhaps. Healthy competition is GOOD for consumers. Intel being dead would be very bad for consumers.

Re:It has to be said.

[commo1]

Only 1.04%, actually. :(

It's the principle of it. Good shot in the arm for AMD.

As far as all of you bashing AMDs chipsets and processor quality, aside from the fact you're probably not able to fully substantiate your claims.... you're again missing the point. If there was no AMD, a 3.06 GHz CPU would prob still be $1000, like things were 6 years ago (price for bleeding edge CPUs, not 3.06GHz 3 years ago).

Re:It has to be said.

[dhunley]

Oh please. You just proved the point! They beat Intel in retail sales. That means Joe Consumer who is putting together/upgrading his box is now choosing AMD over Intel. That means that the marketing AMD is using is WORKING. And we all know that whatever a person uses at home is what they talk about at work (or indeed, what they use at work. Its the geeks who build/upgrade their own systems, and its the geeks who purchase/lobby at work). SO, the Dell's of the world are going to have to reexamine their exclusivity contracts..

Re:It has to be said.

[derkaas]

Let's all welcome Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf to the Slashdot community! We've been wondering what you were up to.

Re:It has to be said.

[Obyron]

That means that the marketing AMD is using is WORKING.

If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower." I'm not trying to say that more expensive means "better," but I will venture to say that different people like Intel or AMD for different reasons. Why do people in the retail market like AMD? Because it's cheaper, and when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no.

I'm not going to take a side in the Intel/AMD war. My desktop is a P4 and I love it. My server is an AMD Athlon, and I love it too. All I'm saying is that in the retail market-- and yeah, I've worked there-- people "like" AMD because it's cheaper, not because they have any clue about quality.

Re:It has to be said.

[JedKrieg]

I question your assertion that "whatever a person uses at home is what they talk about at work," or rather, the inferrence that computer preference for the home market dicatates the work/office market decisions. Betraying my status as an Apple fan, I'll simply point out that it tends to go the other way around. If your inferrence were true, offices would all use Macs; the home market was cornered by Apple first, then lost as people chose to use M$ PCs because that was what the cubicles had been filled with. At least that's my recollection.

Re:It has to be said.

[Glock27]

AMD outsold Intel in RETAIL desktop sales. Dell is obviously not retail. Here's a better read.

Yes, and lots of corporations and government entities buy Dell as a matter of course. Nonetheless, the fact is that AMD now has better technology in many ways (especially multiway Opteron boxes, which aren't retail either;). AMD is gathering momentum, and Dell would do well to not ignore it...or it will finally start to lose some marketshare over time.

Remember, Dell wasn't always #1...and another entity will be sometime down the road.

It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else). ;-)

Re:It has to be said.

[swordboy]

I agree with your point but I wouldn't want to let someone walk away from slashdot thinking that AMD was now the number one desktop processor supplier. That'd make them look REAL stupid.

But I am happy to see this. I've never used anything but AMD and Cyrix in my own home systems. Intel really has a problem with the 64-bit Pandora's box: they could write off Itanic, creating tens of billions in losses... or they could stick with x86-32 on the desktop (which is what they are planning) and risk losing Dell to AMD.

The next year will be very interesting to say the least. Go AMD!

Re:It has to be said.

[njdj]

They beat Intel in retail sales. That means Joe Consumer who is putting together/upgrading his box is now choosing AMD over Intel.

Joe Consumer never "puts together" his computer or upgrades his CPU. Joe Consumer buys prepackaged systems with Windows XP preinstalled.

Personally (and probably a lot of /.ers are like me) I bought my last 2 systems as case, motherboard, CPU/heatsink, hard drive, CDROM or DVDROM and assembled them. The advantages for me were (1) I could pick Linux-friendly components, (2) I avoided the Microsoft tax, (3) I could pick AMD processors, which are simply better value than Intel processors. I'd assume that almost everybody who does this chooses AMD. Intel costs more because they can charge more for being the "safe" choice for people who don't know what they're doing, a perception they have built over the years with expensive advertising. There's nothing wrong with Intel doing that, but a savvy buyer can get more for the $$.

Re:It has to be said.

[hawkbug]

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.

Re:It has to be said.

[JWW]

I went AMD for my new machine at home because it wasn't just cheaper, it was wayyy cheaper than Intel. In actuality, though, I have found that AMD chip/chipsets have more quirks (read bugs) than Intel chip/chipset combinations. However I am pretty happy with my AMD machine, since a similar Intel box would have cost at least $100 more.

An interesting sidenote: In the quest for a quieter PC (the one in question is a PVR) I ended up buying a heatsink that cost almost as much as the processor.

Re:It has to be said.

[3rd_Floo]

If there was no AMD as we know it, Intel may have not ever been pushed enough to get to the 3.06 GHz by this point in time. Although its likely there would be another competitor, that they would have inspired Intel to get into the clock war like it has with AMD is anyones guess. I think just AMD being a good competitor has improved not only AMD's chips, but also the quality of the Intel chips.

Re:It has to be said.

[pegr]

asunder> One week with 2% over in sales than Intel and you think Intel's finished?

commo1> Only 1.04%, actually. :(

Apparently they used a Pentium for the calculations...

Re:It has to be said.

[kmh071]

This is completely true. I worked retail as well and people (the majority) don't care about anything but getting away with paying as little as possible. I've seen people hedge around over a measly $10 before.

Re:It has to be said.

[Jim_Maryland]

I'm now an admin for an ISP, and bad Sun CPUs make up the large portion of my hardware work.

I'm guessing you work with a lot more Sun boxes than I do, but the only thing I've ever had go bad in one of my Sun boxes was a hard disk. On SGI, I've had a board go once and SCSI cards go a time or two. Usually my biggest problem seems to be Dell power supplies on the PowerEdge server line and the occasional SCSI hard disk on some Dell workstations. The breakdown really seems to be pretty even over all the vendors (maybe the Dells a little more, but not by much), but when a Dell fails, it seems to do it on a newer box if it's going to happen. As for CPU's, can't say that I've had one of them go bad yet.

Re:It has to be said.

[SphericalCrusher]

Hell, if there was no AMD, we may not even SEE a 3.06 GHz processor. After all, AMD was the first to break the GHz barrier.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

I bought my last 80 computers as Dell Optiplexes on a skid at auction. The ones I kept and am using are Pentium III boxes. The whole package of 80 boxes was $40. And they were all Intel boxes.

I am done hand-building machines. I'm tired of Taiwanese chipsets (Optiplexes have Intel chipsets, integrated ATI video chips, integrated 3Com ethernet chips, etc.) The equivalent 'screwdriver shop' clone motherboard has shit taiwanese chips on it.

I used to say I would never buy a proprietary-motherboard system. Now I look back at all the cut-corners screwdriver shop junk I used to cram into cases with 250% more mounting holes than were being used. It's lowest-common-denominator crap for the most part.

Re:It has to be said.

[jp10558]

If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower."

Well... that is one marketing strategy, see Wal-Mart, Amazon.com etc...

However I think they have word of mouth pretty well tied down(well as good as any company gets in a competitive marketplace). I certainly don't recommend Intel to 99% of the people who ask me about building computers. Why? Price is the main point. The other point is with the 64/FX series AMD actually has comparable Intel processors beat in performance. The XP series is very comparable - so at that point it's like buying Marcal Toliet paper instead of Scott toliet paper. You get basically the same thing(for consumers - they don't care or understand hyperthreading vs memory controller onboard vs etc...) for 30% or more off.

when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no.

For the consumer(not techie) just what is the difference? The performance is very comparable. Remember a difference which makes no difference is no difference. For the average consumer this is true.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else). ;-)


Why is that 'telling'? The whole success of AMD is predicated on their presumed 'right' to the Intel instruction set that they appropriated due to them being a second-source producer of 8088 and 80286 processors in the past. AMD grabbed and ran with that. So Intel is now making use of the bits and pieces of extensions that AMD added to that instruction set.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

That's right. It's a good thing AMD has parts competing with the Intel parts. It keeps the Intel parts innovative and less expensive for me to buy.

Someone else can keep the AMD parts, though. I had enough AMD parts after buying a couple of K6 boxes back in the day.

AMD used to make good TTL chips, though. I'll grant them that.

Re:It has to be said.

[jtshaw]

The flaw in your arguement is "Joe Consumer" doesn't build or upgrade his own machine. Joe Consumer calls up Dell and Gateway and places like that. Joe Consumer buys systems off the shelf at Best Buy and Compusa.

It is good to see that you can find AMD machines on the shelves at these places now. But don't forget who still sells the most total computers, and don't forget that they still only offer Intel processors as an option.

AMD is making steps. And that is good to see, but you really don't want the market getting too skewed in there favor because then they will effectively be the next Intel... which some many people seam to hate.

Re:It has to be said.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

The advantages for me were (1) I could pick Linux-friendly components, (2) I avoided the Microsoft tax, (3) I could pick AMD processors, which are simply better value than Intel processors.

<aol>me too</aol>

Re:It has to be said.

[ImpTech]

True, the actual CPU is rarely defective. I'll attest to that. However, as you said, the motherboard's chipset is often the root cause of severe stability and performance problems. Intel has historically made the most reliable chipsets and motherboards, which of course only take Intel chips, which is why (whether people realize it or not) Intel has the reputation as the higher quality vendor.

Re:It has to be said.

[dave_f1m]

> One week with 2% over in sales

> Only 1.04%, actually. :(

> Repeat after me...
> 52 - 48 = 4
> They sold FOUR PERCENT MORE.

52/48=1.08333

That's 8.3% more.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

I took Freshman Comp back in 1977. Took the second term of Freshman Comp in 1978 where we read and studied 'Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner (the original cyberpunk novel). Were you out of the nursery by then?

Consider taking a reading comprehensive course. It's probably a remedial course at your Junior College.

Re:It has to be said.

[macdaddy357]

I bought my first AMD processor, a K-5, after reading about the Pentium bug. I have not purchased any Intel since the 486.

Re:It has to be said.

[metamatic]

Funny, I build systems precisely to ensure that I get high quality components. It's the PC boxshifters like Dell, Compaq and HP who build their systems out of crappy components, to shave a few pennies off the price.

I want a silent Seagate hard drive, a better-than-Plextor CD-RW, a motherboard that has open source drivers for all the hardware, and so on. The only way to get parts of that quality is to build the machine yourself. Even Apple use some pretty crappy components.

Re:It has to be said.

[alienw]

First, AMD is still the only company to offer a 64-bit x86-compatible CPU. That is a HUGE achievement, and they have definitely gained a foothold in the server market with the Opteron (while intel is playing catch-up). AMD delivers a lot of bang for the buck compared to Intel, so I wouldn't say people buy them just because they are cheap.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

If you think an integrated 3C905 ethernet isn't 'high quality components' you should stuck to your TrendNet or Linksys NIC, I guess. Or whatever crap chips from Taiwan they're shoveling on the noname motherboards at present.

Dell makes products on numerous 'tiers'. The Optiplex isn't what you get when you order a crummy consumer Dell box.

I haven't found anything on my Optiplex motherboards that isn't supported with Slackware.

ATI video chipset
3Com ethernet

The integrated sound is kinda crappy. Right down at the level of quality on the 'built it yourself' Taiwanese clone motherboard scuzz.

Be careful. Don't cut your hand on the rough edge on that crappy ATX clone case, now....

Re:It has to be said.

[Anonymous Coward]

For my last upgrade (in January this year), I saved nearly 300 bucks by going with AMD instead of Intel. That's when calculating the cost of the CPU, motherboard, and RAM for each option. It's working great for me too. :)

Re:It has to be said.

[rhuntley12]

Plus Intel gave us those cool aliens who use the P4. Their processor is so good aliens from other galaxies come to Earth to steal Intel processors and only probe people to distract. Hey there is a light outside

Re:It has to be said.

[JET 666]

they have been saying that for 20 years

Re:It has to be said.

[obeythefist]

nVidia doesn't make motherboards.
Did the chipset on the board fail, or some other component on the board apart from the north/south bridge chips? Because nothing, apart from those two chips is nVidia's fault.

Perhaps you were thinking of some other manufacturer besides nVidia?

Epox?
Asus?
AOpen?
Gigabyte?
MSI?
Intel?

There are dozens and dozens of manufacturers for PC motherboards. nVidia is not one of them. They just happen to make chipsets, much like SiS and Via and Intel.

It's important to understand in this industry, just like many others, that you usually get what you pay for. You don't buy a Gateway PC and then complain that it's unstable because it's got an Intel CPU in it, that isn't the problem. It's all the other cost cutting the manufacturer undertakes.

I have never seen a nVidia chipset/mainboard die, but then all the ones I spec for friends/family are either on ASUS or Gigabyte boards, both companies well known for quality. And I research each individual board prior to putting down money, to make sure I know about any common faults.

Re:It has to be said.

[obeythefist]

Despite being a chronic AMD fanboy, I agree wholeheartedly. Every intel chipset I've dealt with has been great. One of the reasons AMD has been so lousy in terms of sales is because of the awful problems with both the AMD and the Via chipsets available. (The i820 memory handling problem excused of course)

The NForce chipset is incredibly stable compared to any of the Via's, from my personal experience. I usually buy only ASUS mainboards, but even still I haven't enjoyed the kind of stability I've had on either Intel or Nvidia chipsets compared to the via ones. And I've seen the same kinds of problems across several vendor parts when using Via gear. Via's intel chipsets are a lot better than the AMD ones, but they still have a lot of cludges. Anybody who's had to manually specify AGP timings on a Via board because Via doesn't do it right will know what I'm talking about.

Re:It has to be said.

[Forge]

If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower." I'm not trying to say that more expensive means "better," but I will venture to say that different people like Intel or AMD for different reasons. Why do people in the retail market like AMD? Because it's cheaper, and when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no.

When you are talking about something as finite in it's intended function as a CPU then the requirements can be easily quantified and separated.

While they are numbered for clarity the order of importance depends on the user and the system being built.

1. Compatibility. Will it run the code I want it to run?
2. Speed. How long dose it take to complete task X ?
3. Temperature. Do I need a dedicated AC, a heat sink or something in between?
4. Price. How many dollars do I need to spend for this chip and it's "support infrastructure" (RAM, Motherboard etc..) ?
5. Power consumption.

For most users, All current AMD and iNTEL desktop chips are equal on points 1, 3 and 5. (Not that there aren't differences. They just don't matter).

With items 2 and 4 being the entire basis of choosing a chip the equation comes down to "How fast can my system run if I spend $250 on the CPU?"

PS: If it was up to me reviewers would abandon the "AMD's 3GH chip vs iNTEL's 3GH chip" comparisons and adopt "AMD's $900 chip vs iNTEL's $900 chip" matchup. It's how _I_ Shop for CPUs and until someone convinces me of a problem in this approach I will continue to use it.

Re:It has to be said.

[raminator]

Retail is stores only, not the internet sales that the tech heads buy from to build computers.

Re:It has to be said.

[hesiod]

> reviewers would abandon the "AMD's 3GH chip vs iNTEL's 3GH chip" comparisons and adopt "AMD's $900 chip vs iNTEL's $900 chip" matchup.

Because the noticeable performance gap would grow even larger & Intel would sue them for misrepresentation. Not really, but if I don't practice being cynical all the time I might lose the ability -- that would be a shame.

Re:It has to be said.

[hesiod]

> If your inferrence were true, offices would all use Macs; the home market was cornered by Apple first
> people chose to use M$ PCs because that was what the cubicles had been filled with

Except that when buying 100 computers, a $1000 price difference on each one adds up. No, I think a major reason was that Apples are just too expensive for the limited work an average secretary would do on it.

Would I buy an SGI to design letterhead logos? Hell no, it's overkill, unnecessary, and way too damned expensive for the use. Most people don't need the power of an Apple for their work -- of course, most of them wouldn't really even need a 500Mhz processor if the size & bloat of Windows didn't grow exponentially with each release.

Apples are beautiful, powerful, amazingly stable machines that, for business use, I wouldn't wish upon our worst competitor (If we were in a competitive field). It just doesn't have the variety, availability, and price.

Re:It has to be said.

[hesiod]

> Consider taking a reading comprehensive course.

It doesn't help your argument that that makes no sense at all. Sure, the other guy is an ass, but it's either a "comprehensive course" or "reading comprehension course." Or a "comprehensive reading comprehension course."

Why is it that old people think they are smarter than you just because they are old?

Re:It has to be said.

[ArsonSmith]

AMD is using it's new found market share to crush the little guys like Intel with its less than 50% sales. I think the DOJ should look into AMD for monopolistic practaces and there use of their supiror market share to bully the little guys.

Re:It has to be said.

[Halfbaked Plan]

Why is it that old people think they are smarter than you just because they are old?

To the contrary. I remember how smart I was back when I was in my early twenties. Certainly much smarter than I could ever be today. I knew almost everything about any topic, and had an opinion always at hand.

Yep.

(a bunch of 40+ types are probably nodding after reading this comment)

Re:It has to be said.

[metamatic]

The exploding capacitors affected lots of big name manufacturers, including IBM. So much for that theory.

If Ruiz had his way

[andyrut]

So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?

According to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, it's only a matter of time until Dell puts Opteron in their servers. Of course, that's news to Dell, who are currently an exclusive Intel shop and haven't announced any change in that policy.

If I were the CEO of a chip company looking to court one of the most successful PC makers to use my processors, I probably wouldn't do so with a comment like this:

"I've always thought that Dell does not like to be a leader in technology, that they were a strong follower...But I didn't realize they were going to be dead last"

And yet that's what Ruiz said at a recent press conference.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Short Circuit]

Yeah, but if they don't start shipping Opteron, the press (and shallow portions of the tech public) will backlash against Dell.

It's a pretty low thing to do, but I'd love to see AMD in Dell machines.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Anonymous Coward]

Wanna cyber? I have my robe and wizard's hat.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Gyan]

If I were the CEO of a chip company looking to court one of the most successful PC makers to use my processors, I probably wouldn't do so with a comment like this:

Which probably indicates that AMD has resigned itself to !Dell for a decent period into the future.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Allen Zadr]

I have to agree

From the Article:
"... some have argued that Intel is currently experiencing a lull in product demand as customers wait for the juice to be let loose in the form of PCI-Express, DDR2, and improved wireless support."

I am putting off purchasing Intel because of this very thing. Intel has been promising more features - and Linux support for Centrino - I'm not buying until I see it. Further, being a Dell shop, here, a little change-up to AMD would certainly be welcome.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[david_reese]

Which probably indicates that AMD has resigned itself to !Dell for a decent period into the future.Note: Dell only exists where it does in the market, because they cut their costs by going all-Intel. I doubt Dell will kill their profits just to cater to a second source. Dell's agreement with Intel is kind of like Intel's agreement with Microsoft, a sort of mini-wintel, if you were. I doubt they'd do anything to sabotage that until and unless Intel either goes down in flames, or sets them up the bomb.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Short Circuit]

Keep in mind that Intel has x86-64 support coming. That may well be enough for Dell to entice stay with the program a little bit longer.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[LoudMusic]

Good lord! That man has balls the size of Texas. If Dell ever does begin using AMD chips it'll probably happen after Ruiz is long gone.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Pii]

I don't know what else you're looking for, but Intel is already supporting Centrino on Linux.

(And for the record, this was posted from a laptop with a mobile Athlon 64)

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[reidbold]

Nah, money talks louder than petty grudges ever could to a CEO.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Short Circuit]

for Dell to entice stay

Argh...what was I thinking?!

And I haven't used an RPN calculator in months!

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[mikeabbott420]

I assume Dell gets better prices on intel processors than their competiters, I assume this is a function of the size and loyalty of Dell. IBM ,Compaq/Dec ,HP etc were all large players but they competed directly with intel in some way, shape or form (i.e. Power,Alpha,PA-RISC, setting bus standards, form factors etc). I assume this has been a symbiotic relationship for both. Intel locks competition out of the largest box mover without giving up margins for anyone else, this helps with maintaning that formidable manufacturing economey of scale advantage. Dell gets to eliminate R&D as a cost plus gets a big pricing advantage. I think if this vertical monopoly cracks it will mean a great deal. I don't think it will happen, to the degree it does I suspect it will be intel saying to dell "yank them around for us". Ruiz tweaking Dell is not as foolish as it may seem, they are a long shot no matter how good the AMD product is. Intel can legally copy AMD due to the the results of previous law suits. If Intel has to copy it will and still compete on economey of scale. I suspect Ruiz, who knows all of this far better than I, is playing enemy of my enemy for Dells competiters.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Allen Zadr]

From the site: "The downloads provided here should be considered "nightly snapshots". Once we have a snapshot that is showing stability, we will affix 'stable' to the name."

Thank you much for the info. My problem remains though. It's not stable yet. This is useless to me until stable. I wouldn't buy a Windows product without stable Windows drivers, I don't think Linux should have to be different.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Ya Bolshoi!]

To be fair, AMD has Dell by the short and curlies. Opterons blow Xeons out of the water, especially when it's a multi-processor system. Doesn't matter how much of a jerk Ruiz is, cuz Dell has to start using Opterons to remain competitive.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[dAzED1]

dell is where it is for FAR more reasons than just being all-intel. Having an almost non-existent R&D is a primary factor, having parts manufactured by the cheapest offshore bidder for years is another (they were merely assembled here). using intel? Minor, minor factor.

I personally hope that dell never uses AMD. It would almost taint AMD, really. Not that I think dell sucks or anything...its just their desktops, servers, and laptops that have always been terrible. All their other computers are good.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[captain_craptacular]

Ahh, you're pretty much dead wrong about HP. Not only were they at one time (just after the Compaq merger for about 3 minutes) the largest PC seller in the world, they were also at the same time one of Intels biggest cooperating partners. Itanic is and has been for some time a joint Intel/HP project and HP makes no bones about the fact that they plan on replacing PA/RISC with Itanic ASAP. So I'd say they were in a position to command just as low of prices as Dell, or anyone.

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Trejkaz]

Don't lets be silly. Dell shipping with AMD would lower their prices and they can't have that. Must .. stay .. expensive!

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[mikeabbott420]

Do you disagree that HP was a source of competiton at one time ( all I'm saying)? Giving up PA-RISC was a surrender, it may not even have been a foolish one , if the compiler driven itanic theory originated with HP and Intel can't make it work then what chance did HP have?

Re:If Ruiz had his way

[Deliveranc3]

"I've always thought that Dell does not like to be a leader in technology, that they were a strong follower...But I didn't realize they were going to be dead last"

Retailers can't break designers.
The other way around is possible.
He can say what he wants, and let's hope dell goes down for someone with decent customer support.

Statistical outlier

[MAXOMENOS]

When AMD beats Intel for several weeks in a row, let me know.

Re:Statistical outlier

[lacrymology.com]

Wouldn't the true definition of outlier be if AMD were to sell some absurd percentage of chips (i.e. 95%)?

-m

Re:Statistical outlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, this is only Retail CPUs -- the ones that come in a nice shiny box. Since (rough estimate) 98.2% of CPUs are sold to OEMs, its a pretty unimportant figure.

Re:Statistical outlier

[bogie]

Minimize this any way you want if that makes you feel better but this is still a real accomplishment. AMD doesn't have to annihilate Intel for this to be considered a worthy achievement.

Re:Statistical outlier

[SocietyoftheFist]

I think Intel is noticing, no matter what you think.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I am suspicious too. For Q4 2003 they had 80% of the overall CPU market, AMD had most of the remainder, and that was a slight (1%) growth on Intel's part from previous periods and previous years.

As much as I like AMD, I doubt they'd more than double market share in a single quarter because Athlon 64 barely made a dent in Q4 2003 (I thought it was released late Q3 2003), so its introduction wouldn't quite seem to account for this.

Also, it says "desktop" but there's still "mobile" and "server" markets.

Re:Statistical outlier

[david_reese]

Wouldn't the true definition of outlier be if AMD were to sell some absurd percentage of chips (i.e. 95%)?

I think what the parent is saying is that even 51% is an "absurd" percentage.

And yes, even tho I'm an AMD fan (only buy AMD/VIA for home use), I'd say that unless we get a run of these kind of numbers, this is a statistical outlier.

Re:Statistical outlier

[commo1]

No, they're not. If you aren't ordering CPUs in the thousands (or at least hundreds), you will be getting retail CPUs. OEM CPUs from most brokers cost about 10-12% less than retail, and have no fans (even the "crappy" ones that come retail with the CPUs - though they're no worse than the boxed Intel fans).

Re:Statistical outlier

[JDevers]

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.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Dastardly]

Read the original PCWeek article. It is retail only, and retail appears to be a relative small amount of the total market. At the bottom it says Intel had 83.6% of the x86 desktop, server and notebooks, and AMD shipped 14.9%. Assuming all of AMD's shipments were for retail desktops (they are not), that would mean retail desktops at maximum could be 28.8% of the market. Reality is probably down near 20%.

I think the point for AMD is that for the first time as far as we know they have actually surpassed Intel in sales in any significant portion of the x86 CPU market.

Re:Statistical outlier

[TechnoWeeniePas]

If I scored one point in a game and the other team scored 100 I dont think I would consider that a worthy achievment. When they come close or pass Intel in TOTAL sales for even a week is when I will actually give them the credit of having a "worthy achievment".

Re:Statistical outlier

[tomstdenis]

I don't see AMD [or Intel] as having to have higher sales to "achieve" something. The fact that AMD mobo/cpus are prevalent at all [you can get them pretty much anywhere you can get an Intel setup, excluding say Dell ;-)] means it's a success.

I mean how many retail stores can you walk into and order a C3 or Efficeon setup? [non-laptop anyways...].

That being said AMD Athlons are still being held back by a core showing some age. A 64-bit cache bus [makes SSE painful], low number of read/write buffers and huge heat factor make the Athlon rather annoying.

The K8 is somewhat improved though but still has the heat factor. [For those curious the K8 has 2 more steps in the instruction scheduler which gives a slightly higher IPC, more directpath that is fast ALU/FPU instructions and a 128-bit cache data path].

Fact of the matter though is that for most desktop uses [editing text, browsing the web, playing mp3s, playing games, watching dvds] both the Athlon and P4 series are equally capable of handling the task and then some. So it's really a matter of price, availability and fit.

In my particular case the P4's very low amount of heat [combined with a Thermaltake Polo cpu cooler] and comparable cost [Barton 3000+ costs 235$, P4 2.80C costs 255$ where I live] made the P4 the "winning" choice for me. ;-)

Tom

Re:Statistical outlier

[stuuf]

So this is what we already suspected. People who build their own computers know that the Pentium 4 was a failure in terms of performance so they buy AMD chips. If you similarly misquoted a story about server OSs, you could say Linux is more popular than Windows.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Bedouin X]

The K8 is somewhat improved though but still has the heat factor.

You're joking right? It's well documented that the A64 Chips are notably cooler than any Northwood P4 over 3.0 GHz. We won't even get into the Prescott - AKA PresHOTT to the more cynical.

You can now get an A64 2800+ for the same price as a P4 2.8.

Re:Statistical outlier

[tomstdenis]

I guess the heatspreader helps.

I dunno why people bitch about the P4 though, even clocked at 3.2 [from 2.8] my P4 2.80C idles at a whole 10C over ambient. All with a relatively cheap Thermaltake Polo cooler.

Fuck, even with the best heat sink I could find at the time for my Athlon [a Zen Cooler] it idled at 43C [23C over ambient].

Under load the Athlon put out heat you could feel literally pouring out of the cpu. my P4 underload gets slightly warm to touch [the heat sink] but you can't feel the same heat pouring out of it.

By load I mean running the native md5crk core in linux [Gentoo linux]. I ran the md5crk program for a week straight with no heat issues with the cpu fan set to 2000RPM [the lowest it goes].

Maybe the prescott is hot but the Northwood [the 2.80C at least] is very mild.

Considering I routinely shutdown my Barton 3000+ by running various tests [such as the tests I perform on my LibTomMath library] I find the Pentium [while a tad slower at ALU math] a godsend. It's reliable and speedy enough for my liking.

Tom

Re:Statistical outlier

[mikeabbott420]

Intel could sell their processors for a fraction of what they do, that is why they are so profitable. They don't need to compete on price for a niche market and (not here! I suspect) build your own is a niche market. ( do I need HTML tags to format this?) I believe itanic is a failed experiment. Requiring better much smarter compilers for abitrary implementations running arbitrary code is an insane challenge ( a mixture of this with with JIT runtime enviroments could still be interesting ) and because almost everthing runs a mixture of stuff (or is to trivial to consider i.e a gameboy) It seems to me the system load is completely unknowable to the compiler anyway. I believe 32 bit, general purpose servers are not long for this world. It is just so much easier to when you can map memory on a huge space when dealing with almost any large problem ( remember 8086 segements and expanded memory and what a pain in the ass it all was?). If I was running intel I would ask that these huge transistor budgets available now be allocated to many very simple integer processors that could access a group of special purpose (i.e floating point,mmx) processors and even reconfigurable gate arrays. Not just hyperthreading (which seems toe in the water to me) but rather network on a chip. This would work well with the sort of multi user - multi processor unix/linux software I write and less well where the cpu was , even for this one task , a dedicated machine. So I may be overestimating the value of this because of my own limited experience. It stil pisses me off that a transister count a 1000 times greater then a 386 doesn't do a 1000 times more (plus give me stuff I didn't even anticipate with on chip communication vs external communications). To return to topic, intel tried to use their desktop dominance to eliminate all competiton. They are failing but in the area of manufacturing ability and capitol investment ability they are still unmatched. Whether this is a blip or an omen depends on how well all of intels (process level) competition can band together. IBM,AMD and players like Siemons,TSMC etc together can beat intel. We see evidence that this is happening and it may end up a general motors vs ford ( consolidation of investment rather than ownership perhaps) situation. I think the intel monopoly will be broken, They don't have a microsoft office etc type monopoly component that they can use to buttress the underlying monopoly. In fact I don't think they have a monopoly at all. The behaviour of a processor API ( exact details public and unencumbered) prevents them from acting the microsoft way ,use all of us who have to write code to their ubiquitous client as sharecroppers, forced to serve and completely without rights. APIs in software should be like this, if you allow other people to write to them then those APIs should be public domain. Implement them better and I'm your capitalist , use them to suppress competion then I'm your revolutionary (viva la freedom!). I think Intel will do well even if they have to adopt the AMD instruction set. They are a near monopoly and a small part of the reason computers aren't as cheap or usefull as they could be but the big reason for that is Microsoft.

Re:Statistical outlier

[woobieman29]

Personally, I see the fact that AMD provides me with a proc that is technically equivalent or superior to an Intel proc at a much more attractive price to be a "Worthy Achievment".

Re:Statistical outlier

[mikeabbott420]

RE: the 'rant' "If I was running intel I would ask " I know that much of what I said is ignorant( about the 'processor' I would ask for). I just write software, I have never done any sort of logic design with verilog etc I would appreciate any explanation of why what I propose hasn't already happened. Call me an ignorant idiot if you please, I don't claim anything beyond being interested.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Bryan Ischo]

I have been a big AMD fan for a long time. I still prefer AMD and will build my next system with an Athlon 64.

But my friend recently upgraded his system to an Athlon XP 3000+ and I have to agree with you. It pumps out the heat. He has trouble keeping it under 65 degrees C. His heatsink is Athlon 3000+ approved. He originally was using the same heatsink as he had on his XP 1800+, and going to a 3000+ rated heat sink only brought the temperature down by 2 or 3 degrees C.

At work I have a 3 Ghz P4. It runs very cool. The heatsink never gets more than mildly warm to the touch. My friend's Athlon 3000+ system pumps out very warm air. Even when his system is idling, it seems to produce more heat than my system at work does under full load.

I am still a big fan of AMD, and will continue to use their processors in the future. And I have read conflicting reports on power usage - some people say that the P4 uses more power, some say that the Athlon uses more. All I know is that in my (limited) experience, the Athlons run much much hotter.

That being said, my friend is *very* happy with the performance he gets out of his 3000+. He's keeping it despite the heat issue because it just runs soooo fast ...

Re:Statistical outlier

[tomstdenis]

Well I think it's really for several reasons

1. Intel cpus have better power management. HLT will actually power down a P4 whereas it won't an Athlon [at least not fully and even then you need to disconnect a bus to get it to work].

2. The P4 has a heat spreader. That does help.

3. The P4 is probably made such that the components which generate the most heat are not in the same spot. [speculation...].

4. The P4 has fewer execution units. The Athlon has three very complete ALUs and a powerful FPU. The P4 has two fast ALUs which are incomplete, a slow ALU and a highly pipelined FPU. It's meant for SIMD and trivial ALU ops [compares, add, subtract, move, etc...]

If you own a decent speed Athlon [Barton 3000+ for instance] just put your hand near the cpu while it's churning something like md5crk [or a gentoo build]. You can feel the heat.

Do the same thing with a similarly scaled P4 [for all intents an purposes during my Gentoo build my 2.8Ghz P4 took roughly the same time [if not faster] than my Barton system]].

Sure if you overclock the thing by 800Mhz or something you will notice heat but the chip wasn't designed for that. Heck, try to bump an Athlon up 200Mhz and watch it roast...

Tom

Re:Statistical outlier

[Bedouin X]

People bitch about the P4 because the high end ones are power vampires. Since Intel hasn't done much more than push the chip up 200 MHz in the past year, there hasn't really been much else to talk about.

I never said that the Barton wasn't a hot chip. I was saying that the K8 is not somewhat better, it is significantly better - all around that is, but especially heat-wise. It's not the heat spreader, the only thing that truly helps with is the durability of the chip. The SOI process appears to be the main cause though the efficiency of the chip - as noted below - surely helps as well.

Cool and Quiet is just icing on the cake.

Re:Statistical outlier

[mackkie]

PresHOTT is a very misinformed word. The Prescott CPU may have the highest heat dissapation in terms of WATTAGE... but the actual temperature of the Athlon XP is much hotter and is less stable under a constant full load. While I would not mind building an Athlon system for home desktop use. As of today, I would never put an AthlonXP in a mission critical server.

Re:Statistical outlier

[TheLink]

You said:
"The K8 is somewhat improved though but still has the heat factor"

The normal Athlons run hotter. But not the K8s. You cannot use the normal Athlons as an example of the Athlon64s/Opterons.

Whilst the K8s are speced for 80+Watts, most run at 50+ watts. Which is cooler than most normal Athlons and P4s (not the mobile ones).

My guess for one of the reasons why AMD specs for 80+ watts is because they intend to go dual core and their dual core chips will be pin compatible with the existing single cores - it is advantageous for AMD if most things don't need to be changed - just drop the chip in (in contrast Intel has enough clout to push BTX etc just coz they can't get stuff 100W). Another reason would be to stop people using crappy coolers.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel admits it puts out twice as much heat (measured in watts that convert to heat) than AMD, in half the surface area. There's no way an AMD chip can run "hotter" in the same circumstances.

Um, isn't the number you're looking at the peak power output? Recent CPU core designs are better at idling / throttling / etc than earlier ones. It's not obvious to me whether the recent Pentiums are better at that than recent Athlons, but it may well be the case.

There is also the issue of how well Linux and WinXP take adavantage of these facilities offered by the CPUs.

Re:Statistical outlier

[Bedouin X]

Where in my post did you see ANY mention of an Athlon XP?

"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

This proves more than ever that those who call the PC platform "Wintel" [windows + intel] are stuck in 1998.

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[grunt107]

Just add 'Wamd'!!!

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[Adriax]

What about LAMD?
Of course the windows and intel people would pronounce it "LAME-D" and use their massive budgets to get that out as the standard pronounciation...

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[Nazmun]

Exactly... I see a future in which we'll all be running LAMD.

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

Well if you think about, Intel probably wants to be rid of windows. Its almost a love-hate relationship. Intel is powerful, just like Microsoft, and I am sure Microsoft isn't happy about powering another potential monopoly, something that might give it problems later. If anything Microsoft could be trying to possibly focus on AMD more. Like with the 64-bit desktop version, that come out, for winxp, but before intel got their processor out. Just a thought.

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[jimicus]

What would be the new term? "WMD"?

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[Lord Kano]

This proves more than ever that those who call the PC platform "Wintel" [windows + intel] are stuck in 1998.

Most of AMD's chips are still ia32, guess what the i stands for.

Wintel is still valid for Windows boxen. I got to laugh at my Mac centric friend who called my Duron based Linux box "Wintel".

LK

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[Halfbaked Plan]

my Duron based Linux box

I thought 'Linux' was a brand of laundry detergent. Now you claim it's based on a brand of condom?

Re:"Wintel" is not a valid term anymore

[nutznboltz]

To replace Wintel it would have to be Linadm.

Name Change?

[neurosis101]

Do you think a lot of this is due to a new name? Lets face it, Pentium 4 has been around for years now. If people associate performance with a name, Athlon 64 is brand new, and not heard of so it must be a new and better thing as opposed to the perceived old Pentium 4. As a former computer salesman, I wouldn't be surprised if this would be a driving factor behind AMDs push.

Re:Name Change?

[savaget]

I believe it's the 64 bit nature of the chip that is important to it's success.

Re:Name Change?

[doowy]

as someone who has done sales as well, I can assure you that the driving factor is "better and cheaper" - flashy names help, but 'better and cheaper' goes a long, long way.

Re:Name Change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, clearly an Athlon 64 must be 16 times as powerful as a Pentium 4!

Re:Name Change?

[ImpiousPunk]

You have to be a salesman to know that "better & cheaper" is a strong sales motivator?

Re:Name Change?

[lacrymology.com]

" Do you think a lot of this is due to a new name?"

There is probably something to that; although it's probably not the main factor. I would imagine that this is a well known method used my marketing and sales alike. I would imagine that it's the same force motivating names like:

Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP, 98, Me, 2003, etc... instead of Windows 3.2, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, etc...

Apple OSX Panther, Cheetah, Jaguar, Tiger instead of OpenStep 4.3, 5.0, 5.1, 6.0

-m

Re:Name Change?

[justforaday]

Hmmm...Pentium 4 vs Athlon 64??? Well, I know that 64 is a much larger number than 4. And athletes like to to work hard. So I'm putting my money on the Athlon 64. Geez guys, simple logic really...

Re:Name Change?

[Kelz]

Athlon XP/Athlon 64
Pentium 4/Hyperthreading/Centrino/northbridge/prescott/M.. ..

Re:Name Change?

[talo]

It's not only the name, it's marketing the technology. I'm working as a reseller now, so if i ask from a friend or customer why did they choose AMD and not Intel. Usually it's because it is just cheaper, nothing else. But the others who are after "quality", when they answer it's something like "Because AMD has made AMD64, hooray"... But still they buy old 32bit processors. I'm not sure how the 64bit tech helps them with theis old processors, but they seem to think that way.

I wonder...

[Halueth]

what Dell's next step would be. I heard they have an exclusive contract with Intel till 2006 (correct me if I'm wrong), but they can't ignore the fact that AMD is rocking the CPU market now.

Re:I wonder...

[Junks Jerzey]

what Dell's next step would be. I heard they have an exclusive contract with Intel till 2006 (correct me if I'm wrong), but they can't ignore the fact that AMD is rocking the CPU market now.

Only on desktops. Intel still owns the laptop market by a wide margin, especially as AMD is completely ignoring the low-power market. Remember, laptops are now over 50% of all PC sales.

Re:I wonder...

[Short Circuit]

Uh, AMD has frequency control via PowerNOW!

I don't recall if their mobile processors shut down power to unused portions of the die. I believe they do, though.

Re:I wonder...

[Hoser McMoose]

It's not "desktops", but rather "retail desktops", and that is only a small portion of the market. Note that Dell doesn't sell ANY machines into the retail market, and the bulk of the desktops that HPaq sells are not sold at retail either.

Also the analyst that wrote the article clearly has a very short memory, because AMD had over 50% of the retail desktop market for several months in the earlier days of the Athlon.

As for the laptop market, AMD actually has a REALLY good product for the mobile market. While the Pentium-M might be the best choice, it's an *expensive* chip. AMD's AthlonXP-M manages nearly the same performance and in the same power consumption range. The only real advantage to the Pentium-M is that it's dynamic power-saving technology is a little bit better.

However, if you compare the AthlonXP-M to the Celeron-M or, worse yet, the Mobile Celeron (totally different chip from the Celeron-M), AMD comes out head and shoulders ahead for the same price. Since the Celeron-M has it's dynamic power saving technology mostly disabled and slightly lower performance than the Pentium-M (half the cache and lower clock speeds), the AthlonXP-M is both faster and consumes less power.

Re:I wonder...

[TheLink]

While the article is overhyped, I would like to point out that the white/beige box PCs have significant market share esp in other countries (like the 3rd world).

The Secret Market Contender: White-Box PCs

Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[Performer Guy]

Despite Intel haveing an exclusive with the worlds largest PC maker AMD still beat them. I wonder how things would have looked if Dell gave them a fair shake.

Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is incorrect. These are only RETAIL CPUs and don't include Dell and other OEMs.

Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[Aneurysm9]

Buy a clue, will you. The statistic is for RETAIL DESKTOP PC SALES not retail CPU sales. If you think Dell doesn't sell desktop PCs at retail I want some of whatever you're smoking.

Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[purdue_thor]

Easy there cowboy.

If this guy is right (which I think he is) then RETAIL DESKTOP PC SALES means desktops sold at your typical bricks-and-mortar store, eg. Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., and NOT mail order. So Dell's numbers were not taken into account.

Go into a Best Buy and you see lots of cheap Athlon machines, so I think it makes sense. Heck, those eMachines love AMD.

Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[Halfbaked Plan]

A new sales slogan should be mounted:

"AMD. Good enough for all those eMachines boxes."

Yeah! That will bring 'em in!

Re:Doubly interesting that this is despite Dell

[Aneurysm9]

Well, excuse me for being a child of the information age. If they have a website that looks like a retail sales website, it must be a retail sales establishment in my book. I just don't make the distinction between bricks-and-mortar==retail and retail-over-the-web!=retail.

Err

[andyrut]

My mistake, the gentleman's full name is Hector de Ruiz, not just Hector Ruiz.

Re:Err

[vegetasaiyajin]

Actually, it should be Héctor Ruiz. Ruiz is a common second name in Latin América (and I suppose Spain). I have never seen someone called de Ruiz. Several documents in AMD website confirm it is Héctor Ruiz.

Re:Err

[vegetasaiyajin]

a common second name

I meant a family name.

Don't care.

[blanks]

All I want, and all I care about is having the best product for the best price.

Windows sells more computers with their OS on in then anyone else, are they better?

Opinions aside, all that will matter to me when I build my next PC is proformance and price.

Re:Don't care.

[AviLazar]

And let us not forget, compatability with other software/hardware. I am sure someone can design a super fast, super cheap system. But now make it work with all of our fun and favorite software (with easy integration), and the ball game changes. :) -A

Re:Don't care.

[gl4ss]

well, hardware which even can't run your software has pretty bad performance, right?

performance doesn't just mean how fast the thing switches back and forth, it means actually getting things done..

-

Re:Don't care.

[ashayh]

All I want, and all I care about is having the best product for the best price.
If thats what you want, you should care. You get the best product for the best price due to competition remember ? And competition is what we've got here.

duh....

[dukeluke]

I've seen it coming - why pay more $$ when you get can get better bangs for less $$??

I try to be as savvy as possible concerning my purchases - and I just can't afford to buy a 32 bit Intel chip when I can get a 64 bit AMD chip for comprable costs :)

keeps you thinking...

Re:duh....

[Zebra_X]

I've seen it coming - why pay more $$ when you get can get better bangs for less $$??

Yeah seems pretty silly to me too. Say, where do you find those better bangs for less $$? Chintown rates seem pretty high these days.

Re:duh....

[Nazmun]

Right... if you have the proper hardware a nice $75 dollar cpu will easily outperform a p4 of twice the cost.

You can get a nice athlon xp barton 2500+ (1830 mhz) running to 3200+ almost easily with nvidia's nfoorce line of motherboards. Thats a $75 dollar cpu... Also shuttle makes a solid mobo an-35n ultra that has all the little bells and whistles of a standard mobo thanks once a gain to nvidia putting multiple features (lan, 5.1channel sound, ide controllers) in once chip and making it cheap ($55 at newegg).

Thats a powerful mobo and a chip for the price of a compareble intel cpu.

Re:duh....

[Sinus0idal]

Well when I upgraded recently and when I looked into various benchmarks at the time, the P4 2.6 was basically on a level field with the XP 3000+ and even gave the 3200+ a run for its money. And the P4 2.6 was cheaper. And I can get the P4 2.6 up to 3.2 or even 3.4. So at the time, I was swung to P4. Not to mention the P4 running at those speeds doesn't need a jet fan to cool it or pencil marks adding to the chip to overclock - just stock fan and bios setting tweaks...

Re:duh....

[Nazmun]

It depends on the benchmarks you run... The architectures and the pluses and minuses of both processors are quite different. It really depends on what you need.

There are many things that the xp3000+ would be faster in and others it'd be slow in. For an overclocker like me i haven't bother looking at it because the 2500 will typically go beyond it anyway. Cost is similar to a celeron which be tons slower.

Long time coming, but cool

[Atario]

Upstarts can overtake the entrenched Powers That Be!

It's so beautiful...[wipes away tear]

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[LokiSteve]

AMD is hardly the new kid on the block(I assume this is what you meant by "upstart").

In fact, I once gave a 286(?) that read, stamped on the bottom, "(c)Intel 1982 (c)AMD" to a friend of mine that loves AMD. He still has it on a shelf in his room, as far as I know.

AMD is new to being big, but not new.

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[Atmchicago]

Yes, I, for one, will be welcoming our new AMD overlords. And in 20 years, little Transmeta will kick amd out because everyone will want efficient and fast processors - more and more computers sold are laptops, and I feel that eventually electricity prices will increase enough to make running your computer an expense.

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[andyrut]

Upstarts can overtake the entrenched Powers That Be!

AMD was founded in 1969. So it's an upstart that only took 35 years to lead the week in chip sales. :)

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[Atario]

Yes, as I said..."long time coming".

Make no mistake, for decades, Intel was the 800-lb gorilla of the CPU world. Looks like that time is slowly but surely coming to an end.

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[Halfbaked Plan]

AMD made their own bit-slice processor line, along with a lot of other chip types, before they became a second source producer of Intel x86 processor chips. And it was technicalities in their agreement with Intel to produce x86 second source processors (in the 8088 days) that let them get into the 486 clone business to start with.

Re:Long time coming, but cool

[Hoser McMoose]

Transmeta's going to have to go a LONG way to getting either efficient or fast processors. Right now they are neither, just slow.

It's not even like their chips are really power efficient for the performance that they give, Intel's ULV Celeron chips will blow the Transmeta Efficeon out of the water in terms of performance and they do so with the same power consumption. VIA's got the same level of performance and power consumption as Transmeta's chips but with a MUCH lower price tag.

Basically all Transmeta has going for it is a bit of marketing. Their technology, while somewhat interesting from an academic point of view, really doesn't work very well. The fact that Efficeon's performance is still very weak may be the final nail in the coffin for Transmeta. These days you can scale nearly any chip down to the same power consumption that Transmeta offers, and Intel does just that with their Ultra-Low Voltage chips.

If anything is going to knock Intel out on the low-power side of things, it won't be Transmeta. More likely it will be something along the lines of an ARM processor... of course, Intel is probably the leading manufacturer of high-performance/low-power ARM chips.

Laptops

[(54)T-Dub]

According to the article Intel still outsold AMD in the PC market with a 61% share. Of course this is helped by their 81% share in notebook sales a market that AMD has been unable to succeed. This is crucial because according to the article this market is the fastest growing segment of the PC market. It makes sense that desktops would be a better market for AMD's because user's can pick and choose more easily.

But critics point out that:

On the other hand, AMD may be seeing strong sales on account of Intel's own customers. With Grantsdale just around the corner this quarter, some have argued that Intel is currently experiencing a lull in product demand as customers wait for the juice to be let loose in the form of PCI-Express, DDR2, and improved wireless support.

Germany = Good

[mankey wanker]

AMD is not only a maker of excellent processors, but I like the fact that some at least some are made in Europe. I think the XP processors are made in Germany.

I like buying hardware that makes me feel good about the working conditions of the people manufacturing the product.

Re:Germany = Good

[benzapp]

And they are made in Dresden, a city with so much history that has known so much suffering in the last 60 years.

Re:Germany = Good

[malraid]

There's an Intel plant about a mile away from home (Costa Rica). It's nice plant, people get paid well, and everything. Not like a sweatshop. How's it in Germany?

Re:Germany = Good

[NoodleSlayer]

AMD also has fabs in Sunnyvale, CA and Austin, TX. Although Sunnyvale is largely used for research from what I hear.

I don't think either Intel or AMD use anything that could be considered close to "sweatshop" labor. Afterall the vast majority of their equipment require skilled labor to operate.

And while I'm not completely sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if Intel had a fab somewhere in Europe too.

Re:Germany = Good

[amightywind]

I am glad XP's are made in Germany but if you want a great mobo one country has mastery, Taiwan: ASUS, ABIT, MSI, Soyo, Shuttle, and probably lots more I don't know about. Taiwan rules.

Re:Germany = Good

[leandrod]

> I like the fact that some at least some are made in Europe

By implication, you don't mind that wealth is concentrated in Europe, Anglo-Saxon America, Oceania and the Far East as opposed to Latin America, African and almost all of Asia?

Fellow travellers continue making the rounds...

Re:Germany = Good

[cpghost]

Taiwan: ASUS, ABIT, MSI, Soyo, Shuttle, and probably lots more I don't know about.

Perhaps non-DRM crippled generic hardware in the not so far future? Yes, Taiwan's our hope!

Re:Germany = Good

[ch-chuck]

That's why I never purchase my microprocessors from early American colonists, those butchers.

Re:Germany = Good

[niko9]

Yup. Their certified pre-owned XP processors do well on eBay. ;)

Re:Germany = Good

[women]

This reminds me of a scene in the simpsons:

When Sideshow Bob is in court, accused of trying to kill Bart, the lawyer says to him on the stand, But what about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say, "Die Bart, Die?"
Sideshow Bob responds by saying, "No, That's German for, 'The Bart, The."
Someone in the courtroom then whispers, "No one who speaks German could be an evil man."

Re:Germany = Good

[Halfbaked Plan]

I can't speak for the grandparent, but I view it as a good thing that wealth is concentrated in the locations where wealth is created.

Not sure if you meant to imply that, or if you view it as a problem or not....

Re:Germany = Good

[matticus]

From what I know (living in Dresden) many of the AMD employees here are foreigners, and many you can find on Friday night at Jim Beam's American Bar in Dresden Neustadt. All the AMD employees I met seem to be quite well paid, and it seems the company benefits are quite good as well.

Intel dying? Come on.

[BorisZ]

I think they have such large profit margins on their chips, that they can easily give in somewhat while they design a chip that doesn't rely on the OMG-ITS-A-SHITLOAD-OF-MHZ myth. But that is only possible when Joe User gets smart and realizes MHz isn't everything.. Considering that, I agree, Intel must be dying ;)

AMD has been superior ever since

[Anonymous Coward]

the K6-3. It was only inevitable

$$$$ is everything

[An-Unnecessarily-Lon]

For the Money AMD is a good buy. Power+Performance at a low cost. However Intels chips are much better manufactured and designed IMHO. Had I had the Extra money I would have sprang for the Pentium but I was able to get better video card and more memory for the price diff with the AMD.

Re: $$$$ is everything

[SocietyoftheFist]

...just wondering... what do you base those "opinions" on?

Re: $$$$ is everything

[chrwei]

never read Pentium 4: In Depth? Sure, Intel fixed some the blatent design flaws eventualy, but it still only works as good as it does becuase of huge-Mhz inflating-heat producing pipeline The P4 is a poor design from the start. P3-t's OTOH...

Re: $$$$ is everything

[corngrower]

I would guess that you would be correct in terms of manufacturing technology. Intel has more money for research and development in this area than AMD so I would expect intel's manufacturing technolgy to be better.

However, as far as the logic design, I know for a fact that, several years ago at least, AMD was using chip design tools that were much better than those used at Intel. This allowed AMD chip design engineers to be far more productive than their counterparts at intel and allowed AMD to catch up and surpass intel in this area. One comment a sales mgr made to me after a chip design conference was that intel chip design engineers were totally awed at some of the chip design software AMD was using, as the corresponding tools they were using had been developed in-house and had definite shortcomings. (Some well known graphics chip manufacuturers also used the same sw package as AMD.)

Re: $$$$ is everything

[An-Unnecessarily-Lon]

Right I am talking about WS not Servers. For now AMD has the upper hand with the AMD64's. The P4 was the first CPU that Intel had made that wasnt that impressive.

Just like the Pontiac Aztec or the Ford Festiva. The p4 is not as good as the others. But Intel needs to step it up and bring in a Server CPU that puts the ball in AMDs court to improve.

Re: $$$$ is everything

[Halfbaked Plan]

The personnel make a differenc, too. AMD essentially 'nabbed' a lot of the Dec Alpha development team when Digital was acquired by Compaq. Which resulted in a lot of the good features of the Athlon. Before this point, AMD parts were lackluster Intel clones.

Re:If this is not the first post...

[Anonymous Coward]

...then I will drop my sack into a spinning bicycle wheel. As always, links to video of the carnage will be posted.

we are waiting

the real question is:

[Tumbleweed]

When will people stop asking about when Dell will start using AMD CPUs?

If you want a machine with an AMD CPU, go to someone else. Dell is hardly the end-all-be-all of desktop computers. Yes, they're huge. No, that doesn't mean they're the best, are the least-expensive or have the best service. They're merely the most-popular.

Re:the real question is:

[evilviper]

When will people stop asking about when Dell will start using AMD CPUs?

When Microsoft starts selling Linux...

Re:the real question is:

[stuuf]

That will happen shortly after the devil gives free sleigh rides once Hell freezes over.

Re:the real question is:

[Halfbaked Plan]

Microsoft has been selling a bundle that includes GPL'd software, even including the GNU C Compiler, for quite a few years now....

Formerly known as Interix, now called Services for UNIX.

(It's the big brother of Cygwin. Not a Win32 DLL kludge like Cygwin, but a full POSIX subsystem for the NT kernel.)

The end of high margins on CPUs.

[Animats]

The era of big profits on CPUs is over. They're a commodity now. That's killing Intel.

There's a big change coming to the CPU industry. One of the major graphics chip manufacturers is about to put an x86 CPU in their chipset. This cuts out the CPU vendors entirely.

Re:The end of high margins on CPUs.

[spoonyfork]

One of the major graphics chip manufacturers is about to put an x86 CPU in their chipset.

Link please.

Dell already carries AMD stuff.

[User 956]

When will they carry AMD? C'mon. This came out over a month ago.

Overclockers heaven

[imidazole2]

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.

Product offerings Vs. Public Opinion

[acherrington]

Selling products that happen to offer a cost based advantage compared to their competition is one thing, but how long will it take for AMD to develop a loyal consumer base in the general market? I love AMD, but if another chip manufacturer undercut them, they would be gone.

...business as usual.

[Maxim Kovalenko]

These things happen all the time, and are based on the latest, greatest thing. The Athlon64 just happens to be the newest kid on the block right now. I wouldn't knock Intel out yet...especially with the electro-optical chip advances that Intel Israel has managed to pull off. The article on it is at http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enPage=BlankPa ge&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Arti cles%5El674&enZone=Technology&enVersion=0&

Oh!

[Roman Levin]

So this is the cause of global warming!

Re:Since when is Dell the entire PC industry?

[no-arg constructor]

if a member of your family said they wanted a new pc, what name are they going to associate with a new computer? chances are if they don't say hp, they'll be saying dell. dell may not be the entire pc industry to geeks, but for "average users" they represent one of the main places to get a fully loaded pc over the internet alongisde hp/compaq. the ceo of amd needs to have the foresight to see that while the server business is nice with the opterons, it would be foolish to just insult one of if not the main pc supplier in the united states if you want them to put your chips in your servers/desktops.

Perspective..

[Anonymous Coward]

here

Amazing

[4of12]

If it's true and if it's not some fluke.

Even more so if you could consider that native Windows for [i]AMD-64 won't be available until Q4 according to His Billness at WinHEC.

Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.

Re:Amazing

[chrwei]

IIRC, the AMD 64 runs native 32-bit faster than even higher clocked AMD XP's, not to mention P4's, in several tests. So you get better performance now and with a future OS upgrade even better performance without spending more on hardware. - Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

Re:Amazing

[stratjakt]

Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.

Or they're being mislead into thinking the 64 means something to them, which at the moment it doesnt.

Bigger numbers = better in the comp section at Best Buy.

Re:Amazing

[Halfbaked Plan]

It can be both true and a statistical fluke, ya know.

This is a narrowly-derived statistic that has very little to do with actual market share or total sales volume of parts from the respective vendors.

Does the intel bong carry any more market weight?

[foidulus]

Are consumers choosing AMDs on purpose or are they simply going with what seems to be the least inexpensive pc? Do finicky consumers(who may or may not be tech savvy) still see the intel bong at the end of a television commercial as a sign of quality(and thus worth the extra price?) Intel has had a name for a while that seemed worth the extra price. It may be a combination of AMD improving their image, superior CPU's and a decline in cpu brand importance that lead up to this surge.

Missed?

[goldspider]

"Just a clarification for the editor who missed something HUGE"

I'd bet on "omitted". There's a lot of anti-Intel sentiment around here, afterall, and people will skew whatever they can to make the "good guys" appear to be winning.

Re:Missed?

[dnoyeb]

i have never witnessed this sentiment. I only notice pro, "whoever over clocks the best" or pro- "most bank for the buck" sentiment.

People go back and forth between intel and AMD just as quick as they will between ATi and NVIDIA.

intel has not been a bad guy since they pressured THG, and since THG eventually sold out to them, there is really no one left claiming intel is bad.

Re:Missed?

[obeythefist]

I don't know about that!

AMD CPU's have always offered more bang for the buck than Intel. (Since K7/Athlon anyway).

On the other hand, ATI have only just recently (with the badly screwed up introduction of the Gefore 5xxx series) outperformed nVidia in all three important areas: Quality, Power and Price/Value.

So while my next CPU is AMD, my next GPU is ATI (Sorry nVidia).

Having said that, if AMD is now outselling intel do I have to stop being an AMD fanboy now?

Re:Missed?

[speeDDemon (nw)]

Actually AMD have provided bang for your buck a hell of a lot longer than that. I remember the first system I actually saved 4 and purchased myself was a whopping AMD 386DX40 with co pro, 8mb of ram, 1mb tseng labs et4000, Sound Blaster Pro 2 (Dual channel 8 bit), and a 40Mb (Yes Megabyte) Seagate drive. Was a beast and beat the wimpy 386-33 of the Intel camp by a mile in my extensive game testing *was 13, saved forever to buy that machine...* and still have oh so fond memories

Re:Missed?

[obeythefist]

Heh, actually I had a DX40 myself back in the day. I didn't even think, but of course it was AMD because intel didn't do 40MHz CPU's then. Mind you AMD didn't have the reputation for rock solid stability that they do now. The reliability of AMD CPU's today is definately a major helper for them, especially considering that if you buy intel and you want stability you have to pay the premium for an intel chipset. I'll stick to my NForce anyday.

Dell

[Nynaeve]

According to this article, Dell won't be shipping AMD because they are committed to buying $5 billion worth of Intel hardware.

Its only one month but...

[arock99]

Times do change apparently, this is the first time as far back as I can remember that Intel is not number 1. Great to hear, I used to buy Intel but in terms of quality AMD is not a problem, to boot its cheaper and usually faster than intel. Certainly a long way from the old cyrix days (agh...any remember those? I Wish I didnt...!))

Re:Correlation != Causation

[jellomizer]

Although the parent may be modded as a troll. There is a point there. I have never had a real positive experience with AMDs They always seem to run quickly pause run quickly. Compared to Genuine Intel which seems to run a little smoother. This is both in Linux and in Windows. Perhaps it is because the ones I have used were on budget PC's and the processor is fine but combined with a bunch of crappy hardware it causes the problem. But I have never seen a smooth running AMD Box.

What *I'm* curious about is ...

[Geek_3.3]

... what the past 13 or so weeks looks like. Is it a bonifide TREND (33%, 34%, 40%... 45%, 52%) or is it something like (25%, 25%, 25%, 25%, ... 26%, 52%). Since the site just got /.ed, I don't know... illuminate me whoever got on!

Talk about making statistics say anything.

[coupland]

For the two seconds ending 3:22:05 04 May 2004, AMD sold one processor and Intel sold none, giving AMD 100% market share and Intel 0%. Sure it's only two seconds, but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum!

This one-week stat means little or nothing since: a) it discounts all notebooks which are primarily Intel, and b) it's only talking about the US retail channel. So it ignores the fact that the #1 PC maker in the US (Dell) only sells Intel, and it ignores the massive number of corporate purchases that are mostly Intel. Besides, maybe this wasn't an average week for the industry. Maybe Best Buy was back-ordered on their best-selling Intel part and it skewed the stats.

This is analagous to Tom's Hardware reporting that ATI beats the new NVidia chip in Battlefield 1942 at 640x480 with FSAA disabled and it "could indicate a growing trend!"

Re:Talk about making statistics say anything.

[DroopyStonx]

a) it discounts all notebooks which are primarily Intel

*Used* to be primarily Intel! Have you checked Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other big chain that sells computers lately? You'll have just as many, if not more, AMD than Intel.

I noticed this when I went to purchase my laptop last year and saw that they were pretty much ALL AMD. When I checked with other stores to compare prices, I noticed the same thing. Best Buy actually had more AMD than Intel, but the others had the same amount of both.

Interesting days when retailers actually start to realize true quality in regards to PC hardware!

Re:Talk about making statistics say anything.

[Halfbaked Plan]

The fact that you apparently shopped at a retail outlet that had all AMD-chip notebooks is more a reflection on where you shopped for a notebook than anything else.

You could have gone into an Apple Store, and you would have found not only no notebooks with Intel Processors, but none that had a mandatory Windows bundled with the notebook, either.

Your elation would have been shortsighted, however.

Re:Talk about making statistics say anything.

[addaon]

Right, but it's a good reminder that intel having 90% of the market is truly over, even if we all agree they probably still have 60%-70%. It's the kind of slow decline that just makes you smile.

Re:Talk about making statistics say anything.

[mrchaotica]

When you talk about "Quality" laptops, are you referring to the 1-hour-battery, 10lb, P4 or AthlonXP/64 "desktop replacements", or a computer that's actually portable (e.g. Centrino, Crusoe, or Apple 12")?

When I was shopping for a laptop a few months ago, the only serious contenders (i.e. those which had decent battery life and reasonable weight) were things like the Gateway 200X (Intel), Dell Latitude X200 (Intel), Apple 12" iBook G4 (which I ended up choosing), Sharp Actius MM10 (Crusoe) or AV18 (AMD) (which I couldn't find!) or a rediculously expensive Vaio (which were intel chips anyway!)

Anyway, the point is, portable (as opposed to "luggable") computers are still dominated by Intel.

As a side note, has anybody else noticed that those "luggable" ones are much easier to find than thin-and-light or ultraportable ones?

Disclaimer: I'm as much of an AMD fanboy as anybody; my desktops are a 500MHz Classic Athlon (The first one ever!) and an Athlon XP 2100+

Re:Talk about making statistics say anything.

[Deliveranc3]

Interesting days when retailers actually start to realize true quality in regards to PC hardware!

Never going to happen.

AMD selling more than Intel, isnt that like...

[aardwolf204]

AMD selling more than Intel, isnt that like

ATI taking the video performance crown, or
Apple dominating the online music sales market, or
BSD breaking internet transfer speed records, while dieing.

or AMD making a chip faster than 2.2GHz even though they can keep rating the old ones at 3x00 numbers. ;)

Nah. Must have been a NASA engineer moving a decimal point wrong.

GO AMD! Your cheap parts rock for us poor college gamers!

Re:AMD selling more than Intel, isnt that like...

[Halfbaked Plan]

GO AMD! Your cheap parts rock for us poor college gamers!

Wouldn't a PlayStation 2 be an even better deal?

I call anything thar runs windows

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

WinAMD, whoops, thats WinMAD

Re:I call anything thar runs windows

[anarxia]

WinAMD... it really whips the llama's ass.

Big Deal

[blunte]

This is a big deal, at least as far as headlines go. But remember that CPU sales is only one part of many areas where Intel makes money.

Also, AMD doesn't begin to have the same quality balance sheet that INTC does. AMD is impressive for being able to compete in CPU performance and sales, but it has a very long way to go to really challenge Intel as a business.

AMD brings some thunder

[MicroBerto]

Back when AMD announced the K7 and I was in high school, I decided to invest in them. I saw this was a company that was going to take it to Intel by lowering prices and having faster, more reliable processors.

Intel ruined my parade a bit as they undercut and lowered prices. AMD, however, is still taking it to Intel, and things look good in the 64-bit market.

Were I to sell that stock now, I would lose money. However, I'm hanging onto it because I'm confident in AMD as a company, both marketing wise and technology wise. You don't take on Intel in one year, just like nobody will take out Harley Davidson, Victoria's Secret, or Microsoft quickly. It took Wal-Mart a LONG time to take over, and now look at K-Mart.

My point is that I think AMD is doing things right. I see value in this company still. I'm still using my Athlon 550 as my main processor, about 4.5 years old and still doing everything I need. Go AMD! Can't complain about competition in a standards-based environment

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[The Salamander]

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.

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[moosesocks]

Actually, the stock performance of the two companies over the past 5 years is VERY VERY similar, though AMD didn't see a huge surge in their stock prices until the dot-com boom was nearly over (which is irrelevant,as that was over 5 years ago).

Intel's 5-year graph
Amd's 5 year graph

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[RedWizzard]

And yet over the last five years you'd have made more money in AMD than in Intel (graph).

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[Blackhalo]

AMD's stock may have never grown, but they have never really been in the leadreship position before either. Well once, a couple of summers ago, when they first released the Athalon, they had a decicive lead over Intel in both clock speed and performance. That lasted only about 6 months until that lead forced Intel to release the P IV way before it was ready. In fact, early P IV's failed to outperform the exising P III's.

Now, however, Intel is adopting AMD standards, so the roles are well reversed, and I suspect that we may soon see some amazing growth in AMD's stock price; especially if AMD continues to be profitable. What if Dell were to start shipping AMD? That would of course require AMD to be able to provide processors in the kind of quantity that a monster like Dell would need but it seems to be worth speculating on. The shares that I picked up at 4$ and 7$ are looking pretty fucking good to me now.

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[RedWizzard]

That's great if you bought Intel shares in 1986. I didn't though, and I don't have a DeLorean, so recent performance is far more meaningful than historic performance.

Re:AMD brings some thunder

[enigma48]

Actually, economics students are probably screaming at you - recent performance means nothing. Previous performance means nothing. I've been told that all publically known information about a stock is integrated in the stock price within a minute.

My first argument against this was "hey, what if the CEO that just came in is REALLY good and things well likely improve over the next few years?" That too is integrated into the stock price - analysts far smarter than us, with far more information that us, can judge how 'good' this CEO is at least as good as us.

What does that mean? If we predict the CEO is going to do a kickass job, in ONE minute, the stock price will reflect this - people will keep buying until something else looks better.

If said CEO will do an OK job, again, in a minute the stock price reflects this.

Stock price is pretty much a random variable - for every exception you can think of ("IBMs been doing great for 5 years...") there are FAR far more companies that have apparently 'random' stock prices.

Think of it like this: Intel managed to flip 20 heads in a row back in the 80s, AMDs doing 20 in a row now. What happens tomorrow? Is AMD more likely to keep flipping heads, or Intel? (Answer: Neither)

I can't remember who does this but a fairly prominent school has monkeys compete with expert stock analysts to see who can do better at picking stocks. And the monkeys throw darts. But they still perform similarly to the analysts (not quite as good, because the stock price isn't PERFECTLY random, experts can make SOME good inferences).

So, future investors: pick a few different markets, pick several stocks from each, and let your money stay there for a few decades. *Nothing* beats the after-tax returns of a diversified stock portfolio over the medium or long term. Index funds are great too.

It would be bad if AMD completely destroyed Intel

[Theovon]

COMPETITION.

AMD keeps Intel honest (sorta), and likewise, Intel keeps AMD honest. It would be bad for either one to drop to less than 10% market share, because the consumers would lose out.

On Distributed.net AMD shows to be the fast CPU

[stecoop]

I participate in Distributed.net and if you look at the CPU speeds you'll see that AMD currently has the fastest CPUs for that project. My next processor may be an AMD.

Who's using intel anyway?

[The_DOD_player]

No really!.. I dont mean to troll here.

AMD is IMO a no-brainer for the most desktop users. I havnt bought a intel based machine in god-knows how many years.

A few people I've know, mostly non-tech people and a certain 150 kg MCSE :), have concerns about AMD (or any other non-intel) systems being "incompatible".

Currently I only own AMD and Via based boxes, and I'm very satisfied.

So.. why would anyone want to use intel?

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[M.C. Hampster]

My one humble opinion. I was an AMD loyalist from ~ 1998 to 2003. However, I've always had more crashes, more freezes and faster dying computers using AMD. Last year I switched to Pentium and my new machine runs like a charm. I don't expect my one story to make any difference, but you asked.

Ultimately, I think Intel's just run "better" than AMD's, at least in Windows. I have no statistics or facts, but just my experience in the last few years.

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[Enucite]

The problems with your AMD systems is just an instance of a PEBKAC.

AMD CPUs are just as reliable as Intel CPUs. In fact, I've never seen an unreliable CPU; but I've seen plenty of bad RAM and bad motherboards.

You don't get a reliable system by slapping an AMD chip onto a $30 motherboard with $20 RAM. And certainly shouldn't be blaming an AMD (or Intel) CPU for any stability issues.

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[BigDish]

I am. And I just bought a 3GHz P4 and a Asus P4C800 which will arrive this week to upgrade.
Why? Chipsets. There are NO GOOD CHIPSETS for Athlons.
I've personally worked with:
VIA - Garbage (Buggy everything)
ALI - Garbage (Buggy ACPI, others)
SIS - Garbage

AMD760MP - had some bad experiences with it and ultimately gave up on the board.

I haven't used the NVidia or ATI Chipsets, but I've had very bad experiences with everything not made by ServerWorks or Intel. You have to look at compatibility and reliability in addition to price and peformance.
When I was shopping around for a mobo and CPU, I looked at the Athlons again, because I wanted to do SMP and 2 Xeon's are too expensive. But there's no good AMD chipsets.

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[wed128]

If you don't mind lots of integration, NForce2 is a GREAT AMD chipset

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[M.C. Hampster]

You don't get a reliable system by slapping an AMD chip onto a $30 motherboard with $20 RAM.

Nice try, but that's not what I've been doing with my AMD systems. Like I said, it's just my experience, I don't pretend to state that every AMD customer will experience what I have.

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[Enucite]

So what have you been doing with your AMD systems?

I'm interested because I've never seen an unstable system that was unstable because of the brand of CPU being used.

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[jp10558]

You know, it could be the chipset on the motherboard. Although I've never really had many crashes since WinXP(another thing, were you comparing different versions of windows? It would seem likely given the timespan you indicated), I can say that not all chipsets are equal. Via chipsets can be good or bad, especially depending on the drivers. The nForce set seems to be real stable for me, but slower for DMA HD-HD than my last Via one was(tech support blamed it on me not reinstalling win XP with the change(I did install the new drivers and removed the old ones) so it's a hit I'm willing to take as it rarely affects me.)

Ram can make a big difference too, as well as what other software you have installed. My biggest problem, believe it or not, is ASUS software. The hardware is great, but the video in from my ASUS video card driver seems to bluescreen XP about 40% of the time. I wrote to tech support - no help, even provided error message from the bluescreen - IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL IIRC.

Point is, make sure you're not using totally different vendors for your other hardware before assuming Intel is more stable than AMD. There are bad Intel chipsets as well as AMD chipsets(those not made by the CPU manufacturer). Also consider the other hardware on the system, and the drivers/software for using that hardware.

In the end - as you stated, one data point means nothing statistically, especially not in a controlled environment. Hope Intel keeps working good for you - I'm saving money for as good performance(sometimes better).

Re:Who's using intel anyway?

[Halfbaked Plan]

The motherboards that I most regret purchasing in the last decade were the two K6-2 boards I bought.

Granted, they're the last AMD systems I ever purchased. My brother-in-law has an Athlon system. He can play Rocket Simulator without the machine even needing to be fully booted up.

I have an IBM PC Server 704, with four CPUs and a RAID array of 12 fast SCSI drives in it that's louder, though, so I win the decibels-per-box competition.

Re:And in other news...

[cK-Gunslinger]

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.

"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF?

[SuperBanana]

Grantsdale just around the corner [....] improved wireless support

Will someone please tell me what the hell a chipset has to do with wireless? It's bad enough when Intel bullshits through their teeth about the whole Centrino thing(namely that you've gotta have a special CPU to take advantage of wireless), but it's even worse when analysts and reporters start actually perpetuating the same crap. Wireless is slow enough that you don't need anything even remotely special to "take full advantage"; 33mhz PCI is plenty damn fast enough to handle 8MB/sec or so.

This harks back to the MMX bunny-suit guys claiming that MMX/P2 make the internet work better/faster...

The next Lindows!

[AtariAmarok]

"...Linthlon..."

Hey! Don't give the Linspire/Lindows guys any ideas for their next name!

Power Management...

[evilviper]

I've been using AMD processors (almost exclusively) for a long time now, and as much as I am impressed, I still have one serious complaint...

Power Management.

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).

There is a hack for this though... Programs like FVCool can idle a chip (the electricity and temp savings are tremendous) but it's a hack that should not be required... It also does not work on most AMD motherboards, and has serious side-effects on some (network being disabled, sound distortion, other PCI cards failing, etc.).

It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks. I certainly hope not.

In any case, the 32-bit AMD is seriously lacking in power management, and I continue to consider using Intel chips for that reason alone... A few dollars more is no big deal when it will average half the power usage...

Re:Power Management...

[Pidder]

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).

This is complete bs. My Barton 2500+ is at 48C/61C idle/full load.

Re:Power Management...

[ctid]

It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks. I certainly hope not.

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 /proc/cpuinfo and saw that it was running at "796MHz". WTF?! 205GBP for an 800MHz CPU?? Then I remembered the "Cool and Quiet" feature. When I ran my chess program it immediately jumped up to 2000MHz. I was very surprised to find that it worked "out of the box" on Linux, but I think it's not an OS thing, but a BIOS thing. I may well be wrong about that, however...

Re:Power Management...

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Power Management...

[gid]

I dunno if I believe this. My Linux box has a 1.33ghz Athlon in it. It runs quite a bit hotter if I'm compiling something or doing something else cpu intensive. My temperature graphs show this. I haven't tested it on my Windows XP machine tho, so maybe it's a Windows problem?

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

Thanks for the info, I was sincerely hoping to find out that AMD got it right this time... It's a very impressive feature.

Re:Power Management...

[GodsMadClown]

1.33 athlons are like... 2 major core revisions older than the present Athlon XP procs. You likely have a Thunderbird core. Thoroughbred-b cores run much cooler. Some of the latest Athlon XP procs are even rated to run at 1.35v, and being binned as mobile chips. This low voltage operation, combined with on-the-fly underclocking during low CPU usage can make them for some very cool running indeed. While I do not doubt that your proc is hot, but it's old(er) hardware. As we've seen with Prescott, the core version can make a big difference.

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

I dunno if I believe this.

http://vcool.occludo.net/VC_Theory.html

It runs quite a bit hotter if I'm compiling something or doing something else cpu intensive.

Even with the lack of power management, I also see a small fluxuation in CPU tempurature between idle and maxed-out. It's no more than 10F degrees though. If you are seeing more fluxuation than that, I don't have an explanation for it... Perhaps your computer is located some place that is rather cold?

In any case, CPU tempuratures are just one of two factors... The other is power usage, and that is even more dramatic than CPU temp. My 90watt system drops to almost half that when fvcool is idling the CPU (on the systems where it does work).

I haven't tested it on my Windows XP machine tho, so maybe it's a Windows problem?

No, absolutely not, it's a hardware problem, independant of OS. FVcool doesn't even work on Windows, it's a Unix-only program.

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

This was fixed on Barton a year ago.

Can you provide any sources for that?

In any case, you'll forgive me if I'm not impressed that they finally fixed it after MANY years of it being a serious problem. It's still going to be another year or more before the other XP cores disappear from the market, so you've still got to be careful what you buy... I'm sure it will be even longer before the older Duron cores disappear. AMD really made a mess by not handling HLT in a sane way in the first place.

THIS IS NOT THROTTLING, as throttling cuts the processor speed when the processor gets too hot for the cooling solution

Throttling
2. b : to regulate and especially to reduce the speed of

What AMD does is not the same as what Intel does, but THIS IS STILL THROTTLING.

Re:Power Management...

[gid]

I never knew about all this on-the-fly underclocking stuff until now. I think I might have to get a new machine to help cool down this room some more and save some power. And heck, I'm a java developer so anything to reduce compile times would definitely be a plus. :)

It gets rather hot in here with my Athlon 1.33ghz and my Athlon XP 2600+ running. Replacing a 19" CRT with an LCD flat panel helped tons... Now I need to get rid of my 21" CRT as well. :)

Do the latest 32-bit Athlon XP chips support on-the-fly underclocking, or is that an Athlon 64 only feature?

Re:Power Management...

[jp10558]

You know, for the average home user, they probably don't care much(as long as nothing melts). They may not even notice. I honestly don't care too much either - though just for cool status(pun intended) I wouldn't mind it working, but I guess it doesn't exist for the XP 2800 on a nForce 2 board?

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

for the average home user, they probably don't care much

If they knew how much how much electricity was being wasted, they would care... A few bucks less up-front is no big deal when you have to pay an extra $10/month in your electric bill.

They may not even notice.

In a side-by-side, they would notice. I know my house thermometer is set on boil because my computers run so hot. Then there's the extra-high electric bill.

Re:Power Management...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

This is bull.

I have an Athlon XP 2600+ (Thoroughbred-B) and I can assure you that it puts out more heat when it is busy than when it is idle.

I also have an old Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino). It has an Alpha 8045 heatsink on it. When the system is idle, I can throttle down the fan (Panaflo L1a) to an extremely slow speed. As I run a benchmarking application (Sandra, for example), you can clearly see the CPU heating up when compared to the idle temperature.

I have used FVCool and it makes no difference on either of my systems.

Trust me on this one. My Athlon XP 2600+ is in a Shuttle system with a thermally-managed fan. You can *hear* the fan throttling up after a few minutes of heavy CPU usage. The CPU is clearly drawing more power under load.

Re:Power Management...

[gid]

Can you tell when I started running fvcool? BTW, there's also vcool for windows, that's helping as well, although in windows, the temperature only dropped 7 deg C, not 21 deg C like my linux box.

Thanks for the link, I always thought there was something about Athlon's that made them run unnecessarily hot. :)

Re:Power Management...

[gid]

Weird, I JUST ran vcool and fvcool on my systems, an XP 2600+ running winxp and a 1.33 ghz Athlon running Linux. Both dropped in temp, 8 deg c and 22! deg C respectively. And I have the graphs to prove it. :)

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

I have used FVCool and it makes no difference on either of my systems.

I have two higher-end AMD systems... With one, FVCool drops the tempurature significantly, and the power requirements to about half.

With the other, FVcool does nothing... I get the feeling you have two motherboards that fvcool doesn't support.

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

I'm happy to have helped. It seems that knowledge about this problem is rather rare (just look at all the flames I've recieved on this thread!) and letting more people know about it is a good thing.

Re:Power Management...

[GodsMadClown]

There are Mobile Athlon XP chip availible with the feature. It is branded as PowerNow. It has to be implememneted in the BIOS as well, however. This sort of BIOS feature is only really availible on notebooks. On the Ath64, it is branded Cool and Quiet, and has much more widespread BIOS support for desktop motherboards.

Re:Power Management...

[Remlik]

" when the processor gets too hot for the cooling solution (a problem with Intel P4s)"

Ha ha...AMD Fan boy speak....

Its not a problem with the P4 it is a built in protection to keep the chip from cooking itself you moron. The current heatsink/fan on my P4 3Ghz is smaller than the one on my last PIII 866.

Bias is bias, yours is obvious.

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

I'm afraid you seem to be the one with the bias. What he said is technicall correct...

P4s run rather hot, and under high loads the heatsink/fan may not be enough to cool the processor outright. That is the "problem with Intel P4s" he mentioned.

You are correct too, when P4s get too hot to be cooled by their heatsink/fan, it throttles down to keep the chip from cooking itself.

He talked about the problem, you talked about Intel's solution to that problem. You are both correct, except you call him a moron, even though he is completely correct.

Re:Power Management...

[Remlik]

Unfortunatly this mythical "problem" you both keep talking about is unfounded, and highly speculative. Look at the wording...Tend to overheat.. What does that mean? Does that mean some processors run hotter than others of the same speed? Does that mean some processors have different thermal properties and can't shed heat as fast as others?

What you call a solution to a "problem" is a design feature to prevent chip destruction in the unlikely event that you turn the system on without a sink/fan connected or the fan fails.

Googling for your "problem" returns nothing relevent to normal CPU operation under any load.

In conclusion your "problem" is made up because AMD fan boys can't come up with anything real to attack the Pentium chips with anymore.

In reality I wish people would STOP comparing them. The architectures of both chips are now significantly different and cannot be compared strait out. Buy what you want, run what you want, but don't spread FUD about somthing you know nothing about. I've touched, installed and run more procs than you will likly ever see in your lifetime...these have been AMD, X86, Pentium 1/2/3/4, Cyrix, RISC...everything. Morons talk out of their asses, I was just letting him know he needs to wipe.

Re:Power Management...

[evilviper]

Unfortunatly this mythical "problem" you both keep talking about is unfounded, and highly speculative.

No, it's quite true, and has been discussed extensively on hardware websites and elsewhere.

Look at the wording...Tend to overheat.. What does that mean? Does that mean some processors run hotter than others of the same speed? Does that mean some processors have different thermal properties and can't shed heat as fast as others?

It means the latter. You see, it's primarily due to the P4's large die size that it can't always shed enough heat. That's why such an advanced thermal management system was needed for the P4. A component of the chip may not be able to transfer heat away from itself (through other components, eventually to the heatsink) to operate at full-speed for long periods of time.

What you call a solution to a "problem" is a design feature to prevent chip destruction in the unlikely event that you turn the system on without a sink/fan connected or the fan fails.

Not true at all. Every other processor around only needs one tempurature sensor to detect if the chip is overheating (due to the fan/heatsink failing), while the P4 has several tempurature sensors... One would due if it was only trying to find if the heatsink has fallen-off or the fan has quit. No, the P4 has multiple tempurature sensors because certain portions of the chip may run too hot due to not being able to cool-off quickly enough with the normal cooling system, and it needs to throttle down so that portion of the chip does not cook itself.

In conclusion your "problem" is made up because AMD fan boys can't come up with anything real to attack the Pentium chips with anymore.

No, just because you don't know about a topic, does not mean it doesn't exist. You are making an ass out of yourself by claiming it's been made-up, and declairing everyone who doesn't completely hail Intel an AMD Fanboy.

In reality I wish people would STOP comparing them. The architectures of both chips are now significantly different and cannot be compared strait out.

There is no comparison being made. With that said, comparing heat output, wattage drain, and thermal management solutions is a perfectly valid way to compare any processors, no matter what architecture.

don't spread FUD about somthing you know nothing about.

It is not FUD by any means. Intel has chosen a perfectly valid way to cool their processor. They had a problem with heat, and they solved it with thermal management. I've never heard anyone complain about the way P4s handle heat, so I don't see what your problem with this technical discussion is.

I've touched, installed and run more procs than you will likly ever see in your lifetime...

I don't happen to believe that. I'm at about 250 and counting. But besides that, this has nothing to do with physically installing a CPU, it's entirely about the design of the P4 core. I'm pretty sure you haven't designed any cores in your lifetime, nor will you ever.

Morons talk out of their asses, I was just letting him know he needs to wipe.

Take your own advice, you clearly don't know what you are talking about.

How about some links to show you how wrong you are:
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/july/010 723_P4_Throttling/010723_P4_Throttling.htm
Scroll down to #5 and read. If you follow the link you can read Intel's own "Increasing Microprocessor Power Consumption" whitepaper, that talks about the thermal diode, hot spots, and throttling down the processor before it overheats. Surely you can be paranoid enough that you would believe that Intel is now lying.

But if you don't believe intel, there are millions of other sources on the web about P4 Throttling, thermal management, and hot spots.

Re:Power Management...

[Remlik]

Indeed I have made an ass out of myself. Funny though when I googled for this problem most of what I found was kids bitching about losing FPS in quake with unfounded claims...Nothing of substance. Granted I probably only looked for 10 minutes. Thanks for the site BTW.

For the record I have worked with far more than 250 processors. I built and maintainted PCs/Servers for a local reseller for 8 years through college, that spanned the 486/pentium60/66/90/II/III/4 and AMD/Cyrix versions as well. At the height of the company we were building and shipping more than 100 computers a month. The point I was making there was AMD Cooling apparati have always been larger and hotter through the years. I can count on two hands the number of failed Intel Procs in my lifetime. Unfortunatly the same cannot be said for AMD, more than 50 I can remember being bad out of the box, buring up (literally burning the surface of the chip), or having wierd lockup problems due to heat. Good bad or otherwise past expierence has made me skeptical of their reliability.

I've said before on /. that if AMD's chip is so superior, cooler and cheaper why haven't major server makers (IBM, HPAQ, DELL) adopted a line of them? The Opteron is only now starting to get looked at as a viable server CPU. Cheap and homebrew is great for the masses, but the IT world isn't yet sold.

Thanks for the back and forth, but I think you've shown me I'm done here. :)

486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium...

[Kurt Gray]

I think you're being sarcastic since Intel is one of the undisputed kings of marketing brand monikers (486, OverDrive, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium 4, Itanium). Intel has already anticipated your suggestion, that's why their 64bit offering is called "Itanium" but I wonder if internally it is labelled as a "x786". Itanium sells for around $1800 (for Intel-type motherboards, each $9000 for HP-RX variety) and Itanium rackmount servers can be bought for around $3500, all you need is a 64-bit OS.

Re:486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium...

[Rares Marian]

it will never be called x786, because it is not an x86 architecture. x86 style code will never run on it.

Re:486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium...

[neurosis101]

I think you're misunderstanding me. I know that AMD provides best price/performance in a lot of cases. I know that there are multiple versions of the P4 core. I know that the P4 name is widely known, and that people probably recognize the Pentium name far better than Athlon.

I what I don't know is what the masses think. We're talking retail sales here. For all I know, people could just be buying an HP with a fast processor which happens to be AMD and they're completely ignorant of it. What I'm curious to know is what reasoning goes behind the purchase of an AMD processor for the average Joe. Does he want 64 bits for future expansion? Does he just see a new processor name and think, "Wow, P4s have been around for 4 years now, but this Athlon 64 thing is new"? Or, as mentioned before, is there complete processor ignorance for a lot of the retail sets bought and AMD just happens to have a stronger low end market with the XP line then the Celeron?

This isn't about what I think. I know all the reasons to buy one architecture or the other. But slashdot doesn't make up enough of the retail sales to probably influence this number. I want to know what everyone else thinks.

Re:486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itanium does run x86 code natively, and it's internal code *is* P7 or 786 because it was originally designed as the successor to the P6 family.

Itanic is sinking fast enough on its own without you know-nothing turds babbling lies about it.

Re:486, Pentium, Xeon, Itanium...

[Halfbaked Plan]

Presumably Intel has abandoned all the old x86 croft to the cheap cloners and 'compatible' vendors.

Except it sounds like they're now going to continue to sell some crippled 'compatible kludge' chips of their own.

Slightly OT: Why not AMD?

[jwpacker]

Once upon a time, you were told not to buy AMD chips because of the bugaboo about them not being "100% Intel compatible" or somesuch.

Since then, I've owned at least three, if not more, AMD chip based machines, from an early K5, to two current machines, an Athlon 1600 and a 2000+ in my wife's laptop. I've never, ever, seen a reason not to trust an AMD chip. Granted, we don't do that much with them, but all of the things that we have done have worked pretty well.

The benchmarks seem to make them an excellent choice in terms of price/performance. I'm curious: is there really any reason, anymore, to avoid an AMD chip?

Re:Slightly OT: Why not AMD?

[mog007]

I'm curious: is there really any reason, anymore, to avoid an AMD chip?

Maybe you have a shitload of Intel motherboards around your house? I don't, but it's possible...

Re:Slightly OT: Why not AMD?

[jbischof]

Once upon a time AMD chips were known to have power/heat issues, heatsink problems, etc. I know my K6-2 seemed to crash a lot more than my roomate's equivalent Pentium (although it certainly didn't have to be the processor).

These days AMD has no such problems. Most people choose a processor for a variety of reasons :

1. Availability - if you are buying from Dell you probably aren't getting AMD.
2. Price - usually favors AMD
3. Processor Speed - sometimes one, sometimes the other
4. Features - 64bit, Hyperthreading, Low Power, Hypertransport, multi-processor, and don't forget support. Many higher end server customers want the full support and realiability Intel provides
5. Marketing - you can't have "Intel Inside" or "Centrino" or "Pentium" if you buy AMD.

So, yes, there are some reasons to avoid AMD. Most consumers probably decide based on availability though.

Re:Slightly OT: Why not AMD?

[kryptkpr]

5. Marketing - you can't have "Intel Inside" or "Centrino" or "Pentium" if you buy AMD.

I have a lot of customers who are very fond of the "Powered by ASUS" and "AMD Athlon XP" stickers proudly displayed at the front of their case ;)

No better marketing then word of mouth..

The Irony...

[mykepredko]

If Dell took on AMD it would probably end up killing AMD.

Intel's strength has always been its ability to drop prices for large customers to levels below that of its competitors. For AMD to become a Dell supplier, it would have to lower its prices to the point where they were not only unprofitable but probably bleeding money from an opened artery.

Intel might not want anything more than AMD to make an offer to Dell that they can't match. Even if it didn't kill AMD, it would put AMD in the place where Intel believes it belongs.

myke

Re:The Irony...

[dicepackage]

Right buying millions upon millions of AMD CPUs is going to put AMD out of buisness. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this theory of yours? AMD makes money off of their processors and if they can get someone like Dell to distribute them then they can lower the price.

Re:The Irony...

[Performer Guy]

I think you underestimate AMD's margins, and underestimate Dell's margins. Dell likes it's cushy deal with Intel because the discounts help their model, but at some point if the price/performance gap remains open for long enough Dell has to make the leap or risk losing volume.

Re:I wonder...[50%- nah]

[bach37]

Remember, laptops are now over 50% of all PC sales.

That statistic was from looking at raw sales dollars $$$$. Since laptops are twice the price as desktops, that stat is n/a; worthless.

Scott

Re:Since when is Dell the entire PC industry?

[WinterSolstice]

Actually, in my family, they would say:
"I want one of those new Macs" :)

Shocking

[Sloppy]

The one shocking thing about this story, is that someone thinks that total sales for a week, happen to be a useful figures to compare.

Good grief.

I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[MarcoAtWork]

I've always bought intel, not because of the CPUs (I think AMD makes really nice hardware) but because of the chipsets.

I've heard way too many horror stories (incompatibilities galore and other bogus things) from friends and acquaintances fighting to get things stable: personally I've always bought and recommended the best asus boards I knew about (P2B, CUSL2-C, P4T, P4C800-E) and never ever had a problem.

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 because, after all, a few hundred extra $$$ are worth my peace of mind many times over (I tend to keep my computers for a long time and I'm past the age where fiddling to get things working is interesting).

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[Zed2K]

I was going to post the exact same thing. I have a Pentium 3 now but with a via chipset motherboard and I have experienced incompatibilities because of the via chipset that I've had to work around. Some have been just an annoyance, others have been a pain in the butt. But because of my experience I've told myself that I won't be buying anything put a mb with an intel chipset in it. This means only intel CPUs.

I would love to buy an AMD processor, if only it would work with intel chipset based motherboards.

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[default luser]

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.

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[MarcoAtWork]

I know about the two previous AMD chipsets, the only problem was that the 760 was available only in dual configurations (I didn't want a dual at the time), and when the 750 came out I hadn't heard much about it. The main problem is what you yourself have talked about, AMD doesn't have the resources to be a chipset maker and they can't afford to alienate their partners (VIA etc.) so they can't really do much about this.

And to the people modding my other post as troll, please, get a life: just because I'm not on the 'AMD is the greatest' bandwagon it doesn't mean that I am out trolling. I have said it before and I'll say it again, if chipsets for the AMD cpus were as good as the CPUs themselves I'd STRONGLY consider getting one myself (heck, money doesn't grow on trees), but at this point in time I want something that 'just works' and never needs to be tweaked, or drivers downloaded for it every week etc. etc.

This is the same reason why I tend to buy NVidia vs ATI (ok, now the ATI people will mod me as troll) because in my experience NVidia drivers seem to play better with older games (I still enjoy very much Grand Prix Legends for example, which I hear has issues on ATI hardware) and with Linux in general.

I am not naive, I know that Intel chipsets have bugs and NVidia drivers have issues: but fact is that most software makers test their stuff with that combination in mind and implement workarounds to make them work.

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[default luser]

Thought I just might mention this in response:

The AMD 760 is designed for single processors as well. I have an Abit KG7 with said chipset, and have also pointed friends toward this chipset (in it's time), and have had nothing but good experiences.

On the other hand, I also have seen good experiences with nVidia's nForce.

I have to ask this: if you think that nVivia can do no more wrong than Intel (that is, you consider them BOTH to be exceptional in quality and stability, and thus worthy of your patronage), then why don't you consider the Athlon a viable and stable platform?

All you want is a stable, high-performance chipset right? Well, nVidia's nForce is absolutely stable and powerful. It basically destroys your whole argument about not buying AMD. Who cares who makes it, if it works? Remember, Intel wasn't always the leader in x86 chipsets.

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[default luser]

And on another note entirely, I might mention this:

When Grand Prix Legends was released, it only supported RRedline and Glide APIs (Rendition and 3DFX cards) for hardware acceleration. I should know, I played Grand Prix Legends on my Hercules Thriller 3D, and it was outstanding.

Three years after release, Papyrus released an unofficial Direct3D "beta" patch. I would not be surprised at all if this was only tested on a small segment of hardware, and possibly uses extensions or tricks proprietary to nVidia cards, as they were "the" card company without peer when this patch was released. Times have since changed.

Don't blame ATI for an unsupported patch for a game released 6 years ago. That's just wishful thinking. Do you expect your ATI card to magically run Glide games as well?

Let me give you an example of something you COULD rightfully get pissed off at ATI about. Let's say your ATI card couldn't play GLQuake, which was designed to be card-agnostic, so long as the card supported OpenGL properly. That would be unforgivable, even if it was some almost completely abandoned extension that Quake required...because it's a STANDARD, and the GL Quake renderer was well designed.

Unfortunately, you won't get an opportunity to rip on ATI's drivers in that case. My Radeon 8500 still playes GLQuake fine with zero glitches, 8 years after it was originally released. This is something that Matrox certainly couldn't do. Now THAT's what you expect from good drivers.

Re:I've considered AMD cpus in the past but...

[MarcoAtWork]

I don't mean to rip on ATI, believe me, but if I'm going to spend $ on a card it has to run whatever games I like (and not vice-versa), and if the ATI people don't think enough about GPLegends to implement the needed workarounds in their drivers they're not going to get my business. The day that NVIDIA cards won't work with GPL and ATI cards do I'll buy ATI :)

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Maul]

Yes, if you buy a shitty motherboard, a shitty hard drive, etc. you can expect poorer performance no matter what processor your choose.

Intel are also producing in Europe

[lxt]

Intel has a fab plant in Ireland - it's the largest fab plant of theirs outside the US. Last time I checked, Ireland was in Europe...so what exactly is your point?

Re:Intel are also producing in Europe

[bender647]

if intel has a fab plant in Ireland, how come i have NEVER seen a processor with Ireland imprinted on the processor? ive only seen Costa Rica, or Malaysia, or Taiwan... Probably the country of final assembly. The die from many companies are assembled in Asia despite being fabbed in the US, or Ireland (who I believe gave quite a tax incentive to companies willing to build wafer fabs in their country).

Re:Intel are also producing in Europe

[Halfbaked Plan]

To clarify the parent's comment: the stamping on the package of many ICs designates the country where packaging was done.

IC Packaging is a lesser-level technology and commonly completed in the third world. Dies are shipped in sealed packages from the fabs in First World countries to the third world for wire bonding and sealing into the package. The wire bonding and packaging are labor intensive and require far less of an infrastructure than fabbing the dies.

So people sometimes get the wrong impression that all chips are made in third world backwater nations, which is not the case. Most of these localities aren't anywhere near capable of hosting a current-tech fab.

Ireland, Germany, the US, etc. are all capable.

Re:Intel are also producing in Europe

[Halfbaked Plan]

I always check off the 'No Karma Bonus' because I figure it's somebody else's job to moderate up comments.

And I see a hell of a lot of drivel posted with the +1 by people who toe the party line but don't have a lot upstairs.

Find me a bunch of EEs with the skills to operate a Fab who want to move to Costa Rica or Vietnam, or Zimbabwe. Mud farmers can't be retrained with a 2 month course.

There are cultures that promote skilled artisans from within, and there are cultures that don't. Ireland is in the former category.

And then there's the political infrastructure. Investors won't put money toward a billion dollar fab in a country that is going to nationalize the whole thing on a whim.

Advertising

[iCharles]

AMD selling more chips.

AMD is sponsoring USPS (Lance Armstrong's team) this year.

Coincidence?

For Instance

[nherc]

If you are in need of BIG names and support some nice AMD dual Operton 1U's can be had from the likes of HP, IBM or Sun.

Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way), crush the Intel Xeon's (as do the two ways) in most web and DB benchmarks. Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well.

WTF?

[numakris]

Uh, graphics chips get to take advantage of the parrallization of 3d operations. desktop chip != graphics chip.

irony of parent modding

[CaptainPinko]

anyone else think it's ironic/humourous that the parent was moderated FLAMEbait as opposed to troll?

Re:Hmmm

[Applepuppy]

"No wonder is been so hot lately. How much does AMD contribute to global warming?" Not as much as Intel does consdering that AMD's new line of 64 bit processors run so cool...

Re:Hmm, I wonder...

[TykeClone]

Those who were getting refunds were smart enough to file earlier. Mostly those who owed taxes were left by the 15th.

Re:"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF?

[Bloater]

I remember when Intel started the Intel Inside (TM) campaign. I was asked by my school friends to confirm that an "Intel" was a special "extra" chip that makes your computer go faster.

What's wrong with Intel?

[Dejohn]

Forgive me if I am being naive here, but why all this Slashdot animosity towards Intel? For a very long time, Intel has produced rock solid, high performance processors. It took AMD a very long time to catch up to Intel's performance figures and now that they have been fairly even keeled in the desktop market, it's still taken several more years to catch up in actual sales volumes. I use Intel's processors mostly in the high-end server realm where even the slightest processor/os incompatibility could be a real headache. Intel has performed slendidly and at the right price. I certainly hope they aren't going away.

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

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,

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[TrancePhreak]

You seem to talk about MMX, but leave out SSE, SSE2 and SSE3. All of which have real world advantages that MMX never really came forth with.

There are some design differences with the P2 and the P3 that you miss as well. I wont get into it, but it starts with the return to smaller chips.

I give you an F in engineering.

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully now the Intel marketeers have removed the handcuffs from the engineers to let them design a new processor without worrying about clockspeed (like they did with Pentium-M) It must have sucked to be a design engineer in those meetings.
"We have this desktop processor design that is twice as fast as anything on the market, runs at 2GHz consuming 40W of power."
"Sounds great, just make it run at 4GHz and we have a winner"
"Umm it doesn't work that way"
"Great, well have the new design on our desk by the end of the week"

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[addaon]

MMX SSE SSE2 = SSE3 Altivec

That is all.

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[addaon]

Well, it would be all, if I used preview.

MMX < SSE < SSE2 <= SSE3 << Altivec.

Re:What's wrong with Intel?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Like I said before, I could have gone on longer. But now it's more like the effects of bad engineering in other areas rather than focusing on the bad engineering itself.

Addaon is pretty much right. Now Intel's got to keep supporting the wrongly designed earlier versions while Motorola/IBM just have one to handle. It's like having to release beta products and still support them later. Sure they have some real world advantages, but it hasn't been as clear cut as Altivec.

There's two(well, part two is sorta two parts) problems I see in terms of "real world advantages" in regards to MMX/SSE*.

1. Future design impact. (This is an engineering issue) They released it, they have to support it until the end of the x86 series. MMX for the most part is now just making the microcode engine bigger which does put a limiter (although small) on how well they can optimize the core later. Eventually SSE* will face the same problem. Simply put, less layers of logic is faster.

2. Developer support. This is not really an engineering issue. Intel has to compete with AMD who sometimes does not have support for the same instructions. This impacts the optimization for the programs people write since you'll have to write for the common denominator or have to take care of two set of routines: one for P4s, one for everything else. At that point, it's easier to search for algorithmic improvements that benefit your app as a whole. Sure compilers do make that a bit easier, but it's not as simple as tossing in a few flags. You need to make sure what you have is parallizable in the first place. Kinda like how the old "ooh, my dual 1ghz is faster than your 1.5ghz" arguments only hold when you got more than one thread working towards a common goal.

3. More developer support. MMX/SSE* most likely overlap across versions. At least functionally. Meaning, if I were to optimize my code and try to select the best instructions to do so, I'd have to research exactly which version works better for each case. If I pick the wrong one, there an unknown impact. With huge instruction sets like x86, we're either going to go through a lot of trouble of researching because of Intel's eagerness to release an incomplete optimization, or leave it up to the compiler to take it's best guess at how your code works. I do however concede that less and less people are doing x86 assembly since compilers are pretty good, but nevertheless, a developer knows his own code best.

Now (we're pretty much out of the engineering and into the long term outlook part), I can also concede that IBM and Motorola suffer from the same problems. Except the scale is so much more smaller. The future design impact is mitigated since Altivec wasn't designed to be a permanent addition into the ISA. Whether or not Intel intended MMX/SSE* to be permanent was decided for them when they promoted to the extent that they did. AMD being pretty much forced to follow demonstrates that. Sure, IBM/Motorola/Apple promoted Altivec a lot too. But PowerPCs are used in much more than just desktops and usually without Altivec. And variations between how IBM and Motorola implemented each instruction do exist, but it's certainly not as severe as waiting for the Athlon 64 to maybe support SSE3 in the next version. (By the way, when I mean not severe, there's a certain instruction on the G5 which takes twice as long as the same instruction on the G4. Nevermind that it hasn't shown up in any benchmarks I've seen, but it does show that IBM did put enough thought into supporting everything Motorola did since the only program I've seen broken was Virtual PC.) As on the developer side. Who uses Altivec? A few embedded DSP systems custom designed to each chip and Apple. Apple's at least making great use of Altivec in the OS and developer tools. There's no "oh what instructions should we use" sort of thing, it's either using Altivec or not. Apple's advantage is that also most of it is through library functions meaning it can be easily switched in and out of large amounts of code sinc

AMD CPUs fragile?

[Crouching Turbo]

It may just be me, but I'm shy of AMD now because I've seen 2 out of 3 processors bought from their XP line die in my hands. Maybe I suck at building systems, but I've never had this problem with Intel. One was replaced under warranty (and still in use almost a year later), and one I never bothered with because I was given a P4 hand-me-down which I am now using in its place...

I was not overclocking or doing anything unusual, just plugged them in and used them. All three worked fine at first, but one died without warning after about 3 months, another consistently ran way too hot (I went through 3 fans/heatsinks trying to keep this thing under 60C) until it cooked.

Anyone have similar experiences or am I just a weirdo?

Re:AMD CPUs fragile?

[emmons]

Use thermal compound.

Re:AMD CPUs fragile?

[Inebrius]

I fried one too, then I used thermal compound. It will allow the heat to transfer from the chip to the heatsink.

Without it, being just a tiny bit off, your chip will fry.

Intel chips have built in thermal protection. Even if the heatsink fall off, they are supposed to keep running by scaling the speed down.

I have heard the newer AMD chips do not have the same problem as the XP line.

Re:AMD CPUs fragile?

[amightywind]

I love my AMD 2800+ but I was appalled at how much pressure I had to put on the heatsink to attach it to the CPU & socket - with a screwdriver no less. There was about 1 mm of thermal material between the heat sink and a crushed CPU. Intel's double latch system seems much less hairy. All's well that ends well, after 10 minutes of terror the BIOS of my mobo came up fine. You can't argue with AMD's price.

Re:AMD CPUs fragile?

[psbrogna]

You're a weirdo. Or you're using HP Pavillion cases.

Re:AMD CPUs fragile?

[Crouching Turbo]

I did, the silver paste crap at CompUSA. Well first I used the AMD-supplied cooler which had their own compound on it, but then on my aftermarket coolers I used the silver compound. The 1700 and 2600 I set up never overheat, but the 2000 for some reason did. Maybe it was a fluke, but again I just didn't have very good luck with them.

Not just Germany...

[SenorCitizen]

AMD and Intel have fabs in the West, but assembly is almost exclusively done in Asia. AMD has a plant in Malaysia and Intel at least one in the Philippines.

Ahtlon faster for editing, slower for games

[Kurt Gray]

AMD Athlon XP does appear to be consistently faster than Pentium 4 at various math-intensive tasks like Photoshop filters but slower than Pentium 4 on OpenGL and Direct3D (most games). It is deceptive when looking to buy a new system and you see a choice "Athlon 2200Mhz" or "Pentium 2800Mhz" for around $100 more and one assumes the extra $100 will get you a faster system... depends on if you're playing games or doing video editing.

no duh

[NineNine]

The only thing is that at least for me, Intel and AMC aren't interchangeable. For some bizarre reason, I haven't seen a stable AMD/W2K Server setup. I'm willing to pay more to get Intel, because a lack of stability is unacceptable.

Re:no duh

[Zeriel]

Well, obviously you don't know what you're doing, then, 'cause I've got a rack with three.

Gonna spring for opteron, soon, but no way Win2k/2k3 is touching that baby.

Re:Hmmm

[irokitt]

Damn right, that heat spreader on the die makes a big difference.

Unfortunately, the research firm…

[Anonymous Coward]

...used an Intel processor to perform the calculations, rendering the AMD percentage well within a huge margin of error.

How about Extreme Editions...

[Chris Pimlott]

Really? Checked out the price of a P4 Extreme Edition CPU lately? Check it out:
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB 512KB: $279.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB Extreme: $910.00

Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB 512KB: $412.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB Extreme: $1,139.00

A grand for a CPU... man, I thought those days were long over...

Re:How about Extreme Editions...

[Halfbaked Plan]

Do some research and find out what they used to charge for a Pentium Pro processor with 2MB of cache.

Re:How about Extreme Editions...

[Chris Pimlott]

And you don't think Intel was making a good margin on those either?

Re:How about Extreme Editions...

[Halfbaked Plan]

Their yield was probably extremely low, but they probably made it up with a stiff markup, yes.

Doubtless, they didn't make as much selling them as some might assume.

Re:Since when is Dell the entire PC industry?

[Powercntrl]

if a member of your family said they wanted a new pc, what name are they going to associate with a new computer?

Most likely, they'd ask me to build a PC for them, as has been the situation in the past.

If it was some other family, chances are they'd be going to the local CompUSA, Circuit City or Best Buy and picking up whatever's on sale. That'd probably be either an HP or Sony (or an eMachines if they're feeling cheapish).

The point is... The PC industry is not controlled by one company. If people want AMD CPUs, they can buy from a manufacturer that uses them. Dell could disappear tommorow and it wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Re:And in other news...

[Rob Simpson]

That's a pretty bizarre chart. While I know the Athlon 64 is much, much better than the Prescott, some of the numbers just don't make sense - a Barton 2500+ moves up just one degree when going from idle to 100%?

Does anyone have a comparison chart with wattages?

It's not serious...

[Kjella]

...if you had been surfing at a low treshold here, you would see the exact same text used about BSD, Apple or any of the other candidates for "$FOO is dying". To use it with a very successful company at the first hint of some bad news, is a parody on that troll. That's what makes it funny, not its actual contents. Had it been serious, it would deserve a "-1, Braindead" moderation.

Kjella

Re:It's not serious...

[Poeir]

In other news, I just heard some sad news on talk radio...

Uh

[bonch]

Uh, yes it does. If you're a fanboy and think 2% in one week is amazing, go right ahead...but before this can be some sort of breathless victory, one should expect a little better.

Re:Uh

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yes it does. If you're a fanboy and think 2% in one week is amazing, go right ahead...but before this can be some sort of breathless victory, one should expect a little better.

You're missing the point. The point isn't that AMD have suddenly won the race and crushed Intel into the dust and from now on the world shall be ruled by the noble and wise Athlon and there shall be peace and goodwill and so on. The point is that this is the first time in a long time that AMD have sold more than Intel in a week.

It's what's called a "milestone". Passing a physical milestone isn't much of an achievement - you walk a foot and it's done. The point is that it proves you've travelled far enough to reach it.

That's why it's significant, and you don't have to be a fanboy to think so. It's not a victory, but it's still significant.

Re:Well..

[Maul]

1 out of every 3 peoplele are also idiots who don't read the instructions.

Re:The Irony... -Subtle problem

[MerlynEmrys67]

Currently Intel is apparently the low cost provider, plus they get to charge a premium currently. Everyone says AMD is the low cost producer, but with Intel's Gross Margin (what is it, 50% +/- a couple percentage points) I can't see them having a higher production cost.

If Dell were to seriously consider switching to Opteron/Athlon, Intel could easily afford to crater their margins for Dell, leaving AMD unprofitable.

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[lcsjk]

As a hardware engineer, I stopped specifying or using Intel when I realized they were gouging their customers. With much higher volume in X86 processors, Intel should have been able to sell each for less than the other companies could, yet the other sources were less costly than Intel. Intel's manufacturing costs should have been much less than other companies, yet, until just recently, they have sold their processors for a higher price. I only specify Intel when there is no other choice.

Re:I wonder...[50%- nah]

[phatsharpie]

That statistic was from looking at raw sales dollars $$$$. Since laptops are twice the price as desktops, that stat is n/a; worthless.

Even if all laptops are twice as much as desktops, that would mean in percentage of sales, laptops would account for a high of 33% of all CPU's sold. Sure, that's probably too high, but 25% is rather fair.

25% of any market is hardly worthless, and even 20% is pretty significant.

-B

Now the question is..

[ironwill96]

Should I sell my Intel stock?

My reasoning at the time was that Intel was a stronger stock, even though I buy AMD processors and only recommend AMD to my customers because of its high price-to-performance ratio (I know - i'm such a traitor to the company I own stock in!).

I've been thinking about selling my stock lately, and this type of news is not bound to be good for the stock prices. Is anyone else stuck in this dilemma of thinking that Intel is a stronger stock option because their business model does not rely entirely on processors, or do you all have stock in AMD? (Btw, I was proven partially right when AMD's stock price has stayed at the levels it was at over a year ago while Intel has gone up to over $30 per share from about $7 that I bought it at).

Re:Now the question is..

[Sloppy]

Should I sell my Intel stock?

Yes. You should always sell a stock right after some "bad news," when its value has dipped. Then, after it goes back up and looks safe, buy again. Repeat until rich.

52% isn't bad, but...

[patrick.whitlock]

that is only concidering the U.S. retail market. worldwide, everything concidered, amd's market share, is closer to 14% (i could be wrong, but i don't think so). too bad guys

Cats & Dogs Living Together

[psbrogna]

The next announcement I expect to see is Linux distros achieving a dominant marketshare over that other o/s.

Re:I wonder...[50%- nah]

[smc13]

How can you say raw sales dollars are worthless? Dollars are the end all be all in any business. It wouldn't matter if it was only 2% of sales if it was 50% of the sales dollars. 50% of the dollars is huge.

My Athlon 2000 XP _still_ overheats itself

[Borg453b]

That is all well and good, but often I think to myself:

this is my second and last Athlon*.

*until they sort out the heat issues.

If I run it, set at 1.66/1.7 in the bios it always overheats, reaching a temperature above 80 degreesC.

I haven't overclocked it, and its running on a ASUS A7V266-E, cooled with a Coolermaster HHC-001

.. and yes; the cabinet is open ATM.

Any suggestions as to fixing my problem? I'm tired of it running warm and the noise of all my fans.



[ Asus probe sometimes points out that the +12V is about 13V - could that be causing the problem, and if so, any suggestions on what could be causing it? ]

Re:My Athlon 2000 XP _still_ overheats itself

[wpiman]

I bought one of these for my XP2000. I watched the temp once and was shocked at the difference this thing made. I believe I was in the 70s with the stock heatsink fan which was much louder. This thing is all copper and I got some good thermal greese and the temp stay at under 60 with seti@home blasting the CPU to 100% for a few hours. That and it is nearly silent. Now to quiet down my videocard.

Re:My Athlon 2000 XP _still_ overheats itself

[Borg453b]

Yeah, I might have to look into a new CPU-Cooler and some proper thermal paste

Re:"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF?

[stuuf]

That's still wrong. The so-called "Centrino wireless card" is just a Mini PCI Wi-fi adapter made by Intel with no Linux support. No fancy high-speed integration with the motherboard. Power consumption? Who knows...

Re:I wonder...[50%- nah]

[bach37]

I mean that the statistic is from looking at sales dollars, NOT NUMBER OF COMPUTERS SOLD. That's why in the original posters remark the stat doesn't apply in his case. I'm not FREAKING SAYING THAT "RAW SALES DOLLARS ARE WORTHLESS."

Clearly laptops are going to be 50%+ of sales dollars of items in the category of "computer" because they are twice the price of desktops. Search for the old /. article, this was discussed at length awhile back. Anyways,...

Scott

Dell?

[LesPaul75]

Dell will start carrying AMD when Intel goes out of business. It's not going to happen. Intel has complete and utter control over Dell through price manipulation. This isn't new. The only way AMD can win is if others, like HP, somehow start out-selling Dell. That's possible, but Dell shipping AMD simply isn't possible. Dell is Intel. Believe dat.

Re:Well..

[gphinch]

Instructions to install fan: 1.Open box, locate processor 2.Remove covering from CPU contact plate 3.Place fan over cpu and hook on side of clip into tabs. Careful not to put too much pressure on the CPU! 4.Hook the other side of the clip onto the otherside by PRESSING DOWN HARDER THAN YOU SHOULD DIRECTLY ON THE CPU. 5.Oh guess what you cracked the corner of your brand new AMD cpu. Please buy another one since this kind of user "failure" isn't covered by warranty. And don't tell me about CPU shims, they are available for like 2 models of AMD that aren't even current, and you shouldn't have to buy something like this in the first place.

Re:Hm...CPUID, Built-in wireless, Built-in....

[symbolic]

Not something I'd want anywhere near my desktop.

Bout friggin time too!

[evil-osm]

I can't afford to be buying new AMD processors each week just to try and sway the numbers.

Re:Well..

[jcrash]

The other two can't spell?

Seriously though, I'll bet at least half the people that have built more than 5 AMD based systems cracked a CPU at some point.

This obviously cannot last...

[dtjohnson]

AMD makes a very nice Athlon64 chip but obviously AMD lacks the production capacity to sustain a 50+ % market share for any length of time. AMD has only one fab making the 64-bit chips, located in Dresden, Germany, while Intel has major fabs located in Oregon, New Mexico, China, and Ireland, and Israel. The Intel Pentium 4 is also a very nice chip and is more than adequate for most current software so people should not all decide all at once to buy AMD.

Re:This obviously cannot last...

[PlazMan]

Sure it can last. AMD can just buy the capacity they need from Intel since they sure won't be using all of those fabs.

On a more serious note...Intel is going to be in a world of hurt in the next few years. Their design teams are falling apart amidst infighting, politics, and brain drain. I worked there for years and still know tons of people on the lead design teams... most of whom are longing for a job off of the sinking iTanic.

Re:It would be bad if AMD completely destroyed Int

[Slashamatic]

Wouldn't it be interesting if Microsoft has decent competition as well (it looks like it is getting that way, but with OS rather than a commercial competitor).

New Marget Segments

[jbischof]

I think this is probably an accurate reflection of Intel's current strategy. The Desktop CPU market isn't showing much more growth (nothing like the boom years before the internet bubble burst) and Intel is looking for new markets.

Their new market, and I think they are right, is Mobile. Ever heard of Centrino? People are starting to want more than just clock speed. Portability, Battery Life, Hyperthreading and other new features will distingush processors (Intel will soon switch to processor numbers instead of clock speed). The majority of Slashdot readers might not fall into this category, but I think many users want a light, portable, and dynamic laptop instead of a desktop.

I would just be happy if all my computers could bootup or shutdown in under 5 seconds :)

Re:New Marget Segments

[jp10558]

I really can't see having only a laptop. I know people who do that, but it would seem so limiting to me(as well as expensive). I wouldn't mind having a laptop for 3 things though. Taking notes in class, Keeping busy on road trips(where I am NOT driving), and help with running roleplaying games. That's about it really. Everything else I'd rather do with a far more powerful and expandable desktop where I don't have to worry about battery life.

Re:New Marget Segments

[jbischof]

What do you do on your desktop? What is "Everything else"? Probably stuff that either a more powerful laptop could handle, or stuff that most users don't do.

You are right, though, battery life is the last big hurdle until laptops are really useful. There are lots of things coming though, like fuel cells, low power displays, etc that should drastically increase the lifetime of the average laptop in the next couple years.

Dell? Yeah, right!

[s0lar]

> So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?

Only when Dell finally gets out of Intel's bed.

s0lar

Wait... so does that mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

If AMD is beating Intel, does that mean we're supposed to start hating AMD now?

Congrats to AMD...but

[zerofoo]

I interact with lots of IT managers who are testing Opteron to replace many SUN products. The managers i've talked to still hesitate to go full-bore on opteron. Many are waiting for Intel's Nocona CPU (Xeon with 64-bit extensions). There seems to be this belief that Intel has better experience in the enterprise with CPUs and chipsets.

AMDs run with opteron (and athlon 64) may end when Intel releases their 64-bit chips (assuming they don't suck).

-ted

Re:And in other news...

[Lost Race]

ARGH! The "Temperature Increase - Percent Increase" chart just divides load_temp by idle_temp in Celsius to calculate a "percent increase". Ratios in Celsius are meaningless! Convert to Kelvin first! Convert! Convert!

Sorry, had to post that or my head would explode.

I'm glad

[BCW2]

I've thought for years that AMD offered more bang for the buck. I've got 2 2000+ boxes now and would not hesitate to go with AMD for my next box. Intels occaisional lead in performance is always overshadowed by the price. I get better performance per dollar from AMD. I use the AMD heatsink/fan and have never had a heat problem with 2 case fans (80mm in and 92mm out), Antec 1600 case.

Anytime the little guy wins a round I cheer.

Re:I'm glad

[rempelos]

Anytime the little guy wins a round I cheer.

What little guy??? 52% desktop CPU sales shows a very big guy.

In fact AMD has stopped being a little guy for quite some time now. I see that most people sympathize AMD because they think of it as a little guy. Intel on the other hand is seen as the big bad company.

At start, I sympathized AMD as well, but from my experience working in an SME (~50 boxes, workstations + servers) as admin/IT for some years, Intel's CPUs were proven to be more stable and durable. I must say that most problems on AMD CPUs where due to bugs/bad support from the MB chipsets (Good MBs had high cost, thus zeroing the profit from the lower CPU cost).

Anyway, I'm glad that the market is more balanced now but I'm never glad for a particular company. Their only cause is to make us spend more money and in IHMO there should be even more CPU manufacturers in the market.

JHN

Re:I'm glad

[BCW2]

If you look at net profit and total operating budget for any year you care to name, AMD is still "the little guy".

A good AMD motherboard costs about the same as a good P4 MB now days. That makes an AMD system still cheaper.

Re:I'm glad

[rempelos]

Well, 52% is 52% of the market. This certainly equalizes the sizes in one category which AFAIK is AMD's only one, CPU's. Intel produces CPUs, MBs, VGAs, Patents & etc; and it also markets software, like compilers (C, F9x). I wouldn't expect AMD to catch Intel's annual bagdet.

But this doesn't make AMD the little guy. In fact it is a huge international multimillion dollar coorporation.

->. is, be glad only when either one drops the prices

Good for AMD

[mabu]

I really look forward to AMD getting out from under Intel's shadow. They are a great company that make great products that IMO are superior to Intel. We need more PC manufacturers to start offering more AMD options. And if I hear that stupid Intel jingle one more time I'm going postal.

Re:And in other news...

[Amorpheus_MMS]

I have a Barton 2500+ and can confirm its idle and load temperatures are very close, within 2 degrees here...

Good guy?

[nobodyman]

I'm not sure I understand all of the anti-intel sentiment myself. AMD isn't the "good guys" that the geek community has made them out to be. Just like Intel, AMD doesn't arbitrarily set their prices for chips. They charge less because they have low operating and production costs. Yes, every company strives for this, but they don't always resort to sweatshops.

Re:Good guy?

[obeythefist]

Uhm. The article you're linking to is a spoof. You could have reflected that in your post instead of trying to sound serious. Trolls, trolls, trolls, and here's me with no mod points.

Re:Slashdot lies, opinions, and half-truths

[Xabraxas]

Yeah I know I've been trolled but here goes anyway:

If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.

Wrong. The RIAA is attempting to skirt the rules by demanding names from ISPs. Also the OSS community doesn't go after home users. They go after people who take their product and make money off it without showing their source code, as they are required to do.

Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered.

I can't speak for anyone else but I have a job, and have been without a job also. This has nothing to do with that. Metallica isn't starving because someone shared and mp3 of theirs. They won't ever starve if they can put on a good show.

This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.

You contradict yourself. Why should slashdotters care what other people think unless they want to be a part of a "groupthink"? You seem to think that in order to avoid groupthink I must be a part of a larger groupthink, which makes absolutely no sense. Slashdotters are in the minority on some subjects but that does not make us wrong and it definitely does not make us groupthinkers. It's just the opposite in fact.

Speaking of VA Linux--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with VA Linux, it's a-okay.

If you don't like it then leave, or filter out topics. The situation is not really comparable anyway. Stories are submitted by slashdotters from other news sources. Tech news sites owned by a MS site would be completely different because the articles are written by people employed by a MS company.

Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.

I don't know where you got the idea that slashdotters believe that the crappy music is the reason for pirating but it is not and I haven't heard anyone say that it is. Most of the music that comes out now does suck. A lot. It's just a copy of a copy of a copy. Who cares what mainstream society listens to anyway? This is a tech site! What's wrong with the Who anyway? Not everyone can be a 15 year old popstar-loving fanboy. Some of us appreciate REAL music.

Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.

They are evil when they charge you an arm and a leg for something that costs next to nothing. Especially when they didn't create any of it, they just distribute it. The real losers are the customers and the bands. They both get screwed out of money for the sake of the Labels.

The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capita

Re:Win64 won't be available until Q4???

[jp10558]

Hopefully(probably) AMD will by then have the 2nd generation Athlon FX chips out, a lead that may be hard to make up out of the gate for Intel. That means possibly an extra 10% or so performance boost over the Intel offering. Also, by then the FX-53s might be down out of the clouds a little for the average enthusiast to consider buying. That could give them a big leg up. If they keep working at staying ahead.

Re:And here's your answer...

[Wargames]

Anonymous Coward,

Obvious troll but I had nothing better to do but bite. Perhaps together we can help to raise Intel and Dells stock prices!

I take umbrage at your calling me a stupid customer.

I have two Dells. I think Dells are excellent PCs. I have recommended purchase of Dells to my employers. My recommedations are responsible for having had over 100 Dells purchased. Dell PC's are solid, dependable and cost effective. Dell customer support is usually decent.

If you go and price parts for putting together your own PC, you will find that it is difficult to put your own PC together at a price less than an off-the-shelf Dell.

I think some of this "I hate Dell" stuff comes from people who own HP's, Compaqs, Gateways, or Apples, who are happy with their own PCs. Most
PCs, from any manufacturer, work great. 99% of problems I fix as a consultant are software not hardware. Clients will often blame the computer when the problem is actually a software issue.

This "I hate Dell" Reminded me of the decals on the windows of Fords and Chevys with Calvin urinating on the other's decal.

It's hard to beat Dell's prices if you are purchasing a Windows PC. There is more to life than AMD market share. Most people could care less what the processor is as long as it will Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Office.

I am getting ready to build several PC's from scratch and I will probably base them on AMD processors. These PC's are going to be for edutainment rather than business.

I think it would be interesting to hear why you think "they build crappy computers suck big time". And why is it that "AMD is all that matters in the end"?

Re:I wonder...[50%- nah]

[colinrichardday]

No. If twenty percent of units sold are laptops and the rest of the units sold are desktops, and each laptop sells for twice the price of each desktop, then desktops will generate two thirds of the total revenue, and laptops will generate one third of the revenue. By the way, if Intel does so well on laptops, why does mine have an Athlon?

Frequency vs instructions per cycle

[vlad_petric]

Higher frequency means more switching activity per second, and slightly higher voltage for good noise margins. It also needs smaller feature sizes, which (surprisingly enough) means more power consumption as well (increased resistivity for thinner wires, more leakage b/c of electron tunneling)

From a power standpoint it is generally more advantageous to do more computation per clock at a lower frequency than less computation at higher frequency. Of course, many other aspects of the design matter (like cache layout, etc)

Slashdot: Far from perfect, but the best.

[Futurepower(R)]

There's no real connection between the psychology of Slashdot and the management of VA Linux. The managers wisely decided to leave Slashdot as it was before they bought it. Slashdot is the same, with all its strengths and warts. (Except there is very little talk now about Signal11 and Natalie Portman.)

I've been employed, and very busy, the entire time I have read Slashdot.

Slashdot is very helpful. I have no better way to learn all that I need to learn about what's happening in the computer industry. I became friends with a woman who worked for a well-known computer industry magazine. She had very little technical knowledge and very little caring about technical issues. She owned a Mac, but she wrote about PCs. The quality of computer magazines is very low, and is influenced by advertisers.

In contrast, I am informed every day by Slashdot about the industry by people who are actually doing the work. It's true that I have to wade through a lot of comments that are of no interest to me, but I have found no better way.

Slashdot is very important in my thinking and in the thinking of other people who are and will be the leaders of the computer industry.

There is a bug in the SlashCode that sometimes prevents users from seeing all the comments. Nothing has been done about that serious bug for YEARS.

I tried to write an article about the shortcomings of Windows XP: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. I found that, even if I worked all day every day, I could not clearly document all the problems with Microsoft's adversarial, un-idealistic approach to business management. This is not an exaggeration.

It's not true that non-technical people don't have opinions about Microsoft. In fact, many well-educated, well-informed people who don't work in the computer industry are very negative toward Microsoft. They've read the newspaper coverage. They thought Bill Gates lied to the court during the anti-trust trial; they don't like it when big companies try to corrupt the government.

You see a lot of teenage attitudes represented on Slashdot. Some of the teenagers are in their twenties. That's life. Just ignore it. Slashdot is not the only place where there are opinions that don't seem well informed. Don't forget, the evangelicals and born-again Christians, 40% of U.S. voters, voted 87% for George W. Bush, and strongly support the violence in Iraq.

"GNU" is not the fault of Slashdot. "GNU/Linux" is a trademark designed by a very intelligent man who benefited the entire computer industry with his socially advanced ideas, but who is very backward in marketing. I bow down to him with respect even though I think GNU is a very poor trademark, and the drawing of the Gnu even worse.

From the parent comment: "Slashdot professes to be some sort of golden defender of consumer copyright law." Slashdot is a group of maybe 100,000 people who have many very varied opinions.

This isn't good.

[blair1q]

This isn't good for Intel.

It's worse for AMD.

AMD has yet to show it can make a sustainable profit, despite possessing nearly 50% of the market.

They have, in fact, been crippling themselves economically to make their factory investment just break even.

They're going to find that old sales mean nothing to future sales, and unless they can make a significant per-unit profit, they're just running in place.

I like my Athlon XP 2500+

[penginkun]

I recently built a PC (first ever, w00t!) and had my choice of CPUs. I decided on the Athlon XP 2500+ and I have not had any reason to regret it. It's FAST-much faster than my wife's 2.6ghz Celeron (the AMD runs at 1.83ghz). I know Celerons are crippled, but I didn't think there'd be this much disparity.

The next CPU I buy will be an Athon 64. It'll probably be a year before I do, but that's OK. I will never buy an Intel CPU, not because I hate Intel (which I don't, honest) but because I see AMD as being the real innovator and leader. Intel is copying AMD's 64 bit instruction set. Love 'em or hate 'em, MS certified their 64 bit version of Windows for AMD.

I fully expect Intel to come out with a 64 bit chip and try to pass it off as an Intel first innovation, but I'm hopeful that AMD's lead will keep that lie from taking hold.

Re:I like my Athlon XP 2500+

[penginkun]

Flamebait? Why?

If two products are debatable, they're comparable.

[br0d]

br0d's Law #4563

Any two products are which are capable of generating excessive amounts of brand loyality, sparking a decade long, tiresome geek chestbeating debate, are necessarily indistinguishable from one another in their actual social value, and thus their technical merits become inconsequential and they are declared essentially "equal," if not "for all intents and purposes," then at least for the sake of argument. Because arguments are stupid.

The task at hand is signal, the brand loyalty noise.

Examples:

Intel vs. AMD (equal)

Novell vs. NT (equal)

Windows vs. Linux (equal)

Linux vs. BSD (equal)

Mac vs. PC (equal)

BMW vs. Mercedes (equal)

Blondes vs. Brunettes (brunettes. sorry. all science has error.)

I enjoy my simple little world.

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[nomel]

just curriouse...what type of situation would mean "no other choice"? Such as software support and whatnot?

Re:Dell?

[Blackhalo]

Heh, Dell does whatever their customers want, peroid. If enough of Dell's customers want Opteron, Dell will provide. Some comments from AMD's CEO lead me to believe that a LOT of Dell's customers are wanting Opteron. In fact AMD's CEO said that he knew of 2 very large Dell customers were refusing further purchases until Dell could provide Opteron products.

Re:Does the intel bong carry any more market weigh

[goodie3shoes]

Does the Intel bong have multiple pipelines?

Re:Hmm, I wonder...

[Halfbaked Plan]

You forgot to include an additional category of taxpayer:

The people too stupid to file early, who discovered their Tax Refund windfall near the April 15th deadline.

The same class of people who go into the store and buy a eMachines box (with AMD processor) because it's case is the one they're most attracted to.

Maybe they're the ones buying all the AMD parts in the consumer channel, eh?

Apple first, again...

[John Newman]

Every Mac with an Airport card already is a WAP. Laptop, desktop, whatever. Plug in the ethernet cable and share your connection via WiFi. Or create a stand-alone wireless LAN. All with a couple of click-clicks.

Re:Apple first, again...

[rhuntley12]

That's not really integrated though. That works just like my $24 802.11g access point I have on my PC. Integrated would be much sweeter.

Re:Apple first, again...

[addaon]

Let me check your logic...

Integrated: Plugs into the motherboard where the consumer can't touch it.
Not integrated: Plugs into the motherboard where the consumer can touch it.

Okay, that's fair, as long as we're on the same channel.

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[null-sRc]

if intel sold for less than "others"; the anti-competitive lawsuits would start pouring in..

that's why they sell celeron cpus slightly higher than cost instead of at or below cost..

blah blah why am i even trying

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[uujjj]

I've pointed this out before: Intel manufactures its chips considerably cheaper than AMD. AMD is able to sell chips cheaper because it forgoes profit.

My vote is for AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

The last several CPUs I have bought have all been AMD. It just comes down to price/performance for me, and AMD beats Intel hands down in the market segment I am buying in (midrange). Not that I want Intel to go away completely of course, but I sure am happy that AMD is putting some serious hurt on them. Even if you plan to buy Intel CPUs, you should thank AMD for forcing Intel to be more competitive.

As for Dell, no I think they are too stubborn to start selling any AMD based machines. I do think that Dell may have played a role in Intel's decision to clone the AMD-64/Opteron architecture though. If Intel hadn't decided to release a 64 bit x86 chip then Dell might very well have been forced to turn to AMD.

Re:Does the intel bong carry any more market weigh

[zaffir]

Intel sells more in the high-end, self-built sector because the P4 is faster. The bang-for-buck factor isnt there, but P4 systems are consistently faster than AMD. That's just how it is.

In the home sector, Dell rules, and they're all Intel. AMD's not doing so hot in the mobile market.

And in the end, when you ask your average joe computer user if they've heard of AMD you'll get puzzled looks, but they'll recognize Intel.

Re:And here's your answer...

[krunk7]

1. I'm afraid your off your rocker if you think you can't build a custom pc for less than an off the shelf Dell. On the low-end this is true, mainly due to the margin of savings being so small on a $500 dollar PC, but the more you spend the more exagerated the savings become. But don't take my word for it, go to newegg and build a PC comparable to a nice Dell and compare. (I don't feel like doing the clicking for you). Also remember that Dell is going to go the cheap route everywhere they can, e.g., cas 3.0 ram instead of cas 2.0, or the fact the OEM vid cards are NOT the equal of their retail counterpart, etc, etc

2. I'll never buy a Dell again. Not because of the hardware or because of the problems I've had with my laptop (a few), but due to the utter lack of professionalism with which they handled my customer support. I purchased "Next Day at your door Service" with my laptop. It took them 3 months to repair my LCD....that includes twice sending out a tech guy with the wrong part, multiple mysteriously cancelled repair orders, being given non-existant employee ID #'s and names, promised "appeasement itmes" (digi cams, palm's, etc) that were never delivered, and on and on. In fact the NEVER did fix the damn LCD, but ended up shipping me another laptop altogether (which to their credit was a better model). However, to their detriment this laptop is only partly functional with linux whereas the previous, carefully chosen model was 100% compatible.

One last parting shot: Who the heck ever heard of a computer manufacturer who doesn't have online billpay

Intel and AMD ALWAYS compared unfairly...

[brxndxn]

It's unfair that AMD is always compared to Intel using processors that are generally the same speed. Like, Intel has a 3.2ghz P4 so the article compares a 3200+ AMD to it. Then, the 3.2ghz P4 beats the AMD in a few benchmarks...

But what the hell is the real benchmark? PRICE. PRICE. PRICE.

When you can get a 3.2ghz P4 for $410 and an Athlon XP 3200+ for $200, AMD is a better deal. The +/- 5% performance is nothing. AMD will always beat Intel in terms of price/performance - except for the few instances where an Intel chip would overclock well.

Review sites should compare Intel and AMD in terms of price for processor. Like, they review the top processors for each company, then the $400 range, then the $200 range, then the $100 range, etc.. It's not like someone says 'I need either a 2.8ghz P4 or a 2800+ Athlon. A 3.2ghz will not do.'

I am so sick of seeing Anandtech, Ars Technica, Tom's, etc, etc reviewing processors and then saying something to the effect of, "After exhausting review of the two processors, it seems Intel pulls out ahead in 57% of the benchmarks. Therefore, in this case, we recommend Intel." But, the Intel CPU is twice the price. The way CPUs are reviewed is kind of like a car review magazine reviewing cars solely on engine displacement while the $30,000 difference between random GM and random Mercedes is ignored..

The CPU marketplace is fucked up. /I'm gonna go shoot myself.

My Next System -- Are You Listening Dell?

[Nom du Keyboard]

We've been exclusively Dell SOHO customers for the last 8 years, and every system we've gotten from them starting with a pair of PII-223MHz Dimensions through our current systems are still running daily in the business.

However...

The next system I intend to buy will be an Athlon64 from somebody. Are you really listening, Dell?

Umm... and the point is?

[Moraelin]

Much as I'm both an AMD fan and living in Germany, I can't help wonder.

I doubt that any silicon fab involves little children crammed in sweatshops, sewing together CPUs for 14 hours a day with rusty dirty sewing machines. It's one big uber-purified and largely automated installation, because that's the only way it can possibly work at all. I.e., I wouldn't expect that much variation in the working conditions.

Plus, it's the first time I've heard that kind of argument to basically mean "let's keep the rich rich, and the poor poor." When people wanted to feel good about themselves about helping other people's condition, it used to mean giving to some charity or such. It's quite the change to see it mean "let's keep the poor unemployed and in poverty."

Now I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money. You can, for all I care, donate them directly to Bill Gates or start a "help the CEOs buy a new yacht" charity, if that's what makes you feel good about yourself.

But I just have to wonder...

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[JollyFinn]

Some customers have specs requiring intel processors. Not just Intel compatible, but intel. And thats a problem. Ofcourse some bosses wan't intel, and some IT managers want intel and don't wan't to hear about alternatives. And thats a no other choise. Its artificial line. Only reason to go intel is if you need 16+ proc x86 system, or SMT , or want highest per processor FP power. [ITANIUM2.] Or wan't high performance embedded ARM compatible processor. And the there is a case why pentium M could be the choise, wan't high performance in low power package and with x86 compability.

MMX did EXACLY what it was designed for!

[JollyFinn]

MMX was designed a minimal instruction extension to allow certain decoders work in realtime. I cannot remember which, but it was graphics. Now the marketers got a hint of the MMX and marketed it to give you moon from the sky. And while marketing worked for a while, the MMX was later dismissed completely since although it did EXACLY what it was designed to do, it didn't give you the things the marketers said it would. Also it become unnecessary additional complexity burden to carry with now that we have enough integer power to deal with the said decoding routines WITHOUT any MMX code. It was designed for special purpose tasks that worked, and marketed as general purpose all for all solution. Heck PPRO architects gave us wonders by supporting ancient architecture and made it surpass best RISC of the time in integer performance for a short period of time. AMD gives us best bang for buck because its underdog and intel has such marketing muscle that gives it leverage on pricing. If we want something big from intel its itanium2 and further stuff. Pentium4 was slight step in wrong direction, but intel has huge number of engineers working on further products so its only temporary...

Re:It has to be said. -- Pentium bug

[kunudo]

The original pentium had a bug that would say 2+3 = 4,9999999999 or something. I'd consider that faulty, Not in manufacture though, but design.

4 out of 5 PCs can't be wrong

[panda]

Of the 5 PCs in my home office, 4 of them have AMD processors and only one is Intel (800 MHz PIII).

Not very useful information, but there it is.

Dell will start carrying AMD when.....

[Ride-My-Rocket]

"[...] AMD accounted for 52% of desktop CPU sales. Granted its just one week [...] So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?"

Dell will start carrying AMD desktops when it's not just one week that AMD beats Intel, but a number of successive weeks or months.

Re:Dell? Troll?? Puh-lease.

[LesPaul75]

Not sure why this got modded as troll. It's the truth. Dell is basically the branch of Intel that makes the cases, heyboards, monitors, etc... They will never jeopardize their relationship with Intel, and even if they were to think about it (which they won't), Intel would simply threaten to take away the extra-special prices they give Dell on CPUs.

Re:Dell? Troll?? Puh-lease.

[Blackhalo]

Hmm, never is a long time. Just looking at hypotheital possiblities, Opteron could be huge. Everyone except Gateway and Dell have started shipping or are planning to ship Opteron. It could be that that market could get so large that Dell would HAVE to adopt it. Just looking at the prices for Opteron on Pricewatch leads me to believe that very many pople are willing to pay for Opterons in as much quantity as AMD can produce them. At what point would Dell HAVE to start shipping Opteron systems? Sure Dell currently gets some sweet deals on Intel processors and motherboards by being an exclusive vendor, but at what point does the savings there become less than what they could make shipping Opteron systems? How low can Intel go with their preferential treatment of exclusive vendors? What if AMD continues to beat Intel at retail the next week? Questions like these make it seem reasonalble to me to buy and hold AMD stock on the prospect of the potential return I could get when just Dell announces that they are going to ship Opteron. Particularly since AMD beat earnings expectations by some 200% this quarter and Intel missed expectations, even if only by a penny or two. I don't think Intel can afford to sweeten the deal any more.

my boss and AMD

[JThundley]

I asked my boss (I work at a computer repair shop) why we don't build AMD machines and only use Intel. He said that he built AMD machines once and every single one of them came back to him dead. He said it's because "AMD overclocks their CPUs".

I had some real explaining to do.
And yes, he his a Windows Drone.

Re:"improved wireless support" for a chipset? WTF?

[SymphonicMan]

Actually, Intel is leading development of an open source driver for the Centrino MiniPCI card (Pro/wireless 2100).

Re:It has... Intel Lost My Vote long ago.

[lcsjk]

I had a customer that specified Intel for the processor. I just did not use Intel for any of the other support components.