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AMD Beats Intel in CPU Sales
glockenspieler writes "As reported by Ars Technica, for the week ending April 24th, AMD accounted for 52% of desktop CPU sales. Granted its just one week but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum in the desktop market. So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?"
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
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
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.
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.
TruePunk | Games
Upstarts can overtake the entrenched Powers That Be!
It's so beautiful...[wipes away tear]
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
But critics point out that:
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
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.
we are waiting
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.
Wouldn't the true definition of outlier be if AMD were to sell some absurd percentage of chips (i.e. 95%)?
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
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When will they carry AMD? C'mon. This came out over a month ago.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
How much you wanna bet that 25% of the sales were people buying 2200+'s or the likes, and overclocking to 3100+?
I know I was one of them.
That factor alone may be why AMD was on top.
-Imidazole2
So this is the cause of global warming!
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The story is incorrect. These are only RETAIL CPUs and don't include Dell and other OEMs.
... 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!
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!"
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
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
Berto
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.
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.
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.
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...
Please help metamoderate.
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...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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?
Software is like a goldfish - it'll grow to fit the size of it's bowl...
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.
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).
-- the cake is a lie
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?
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.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
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.
What would be the new term? "WMD"?
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...
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.
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.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
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 :)
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
Sorry, had to post that or my head would explode.
I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but here goes my opinion:
:)
For starters, I recently graduated from UC Berkeley. My last class was CS152 where the students form their own groups and design a CPU of their own. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs152
I like good designs. I like tech where people put a lot of work into making it work better and more elegantly than is actually necessary. I admire it when a design just speaks about it's designers and says "we know our shit and we know how to do it good." And to top it off, I'm willing to pay for it....but I can't complain when it's cheap
In short, my problem with Intel is that they're no longer using good engineering to sell. They've switched to marketing bullshit.
The Pentium 4, from an architecture standpoint, is a brute force method of pushing the clock speed for no reason other than to let the marketing guys say "ooh, 3 ghz." The long pipeline is what gives it that ability. The power consumption from the extra flipflops needed to form each pipelining stage and from fliping them so fast makes those huge ass heat sinks necessary. An Intel P4 uses up more physical resources to run simply so they can try to sell more for less performance.
Take a look at the PowerPC and the Athlons. AMD's marketing-speak numbers actually reflect a generally equivalent (yeah yeah, there are always variations, but it's still generally close enough) to the P4's computation power. Sure the Athlons give out ALMOST as much heat, but they're still less than the P4. The lower clock rate helps too in making the system stable since it's easier to have gates that latch/hold correctly at slower speeds (duh.) Less radio interference. You don't need to overclock everything on the board or rely on perfectly placed wires to avoid interference. Heck, it's easier and cheaper to design almost everything else on the board and chipset because of this AND STILL GET THE SAME OR BETTER PERFORMANCE. And the PowerPCs? Looking at Apple's machines, most of them still don't have direct CPU fans. They can use the same chips in the laptops and the desktops. No "mobile" version necessary. Heck, in certain cases, a 500Mhz G4 will actually beat out a 3Ghz P4, although those cases are specialized. (like distributed.net)
All of their "innovations" which they advertise don't really mean anything. MMX was a joke even as far back as the P200s. To execute a MMX instruction, you have to do a bunch of stuff to clear out your registers before you can use the instruction. Unless you had a lot to do, you might have just wasted the gains of the instruction on the prep time since you'll probably have to commit a bunch of stuff to memory which takes a while. NetBurst (the super duper long pipeline) doesn't make your internet experience better, it just increases your instruction latency (which I admit doesn't matter much when you're clocking 3ghz) and cause your CPU to croak on a branch prediction oopsies.
There's a good reason why the current Centrino/PentiumM chipsets are based off a P3. It's because it was a more respectable design than the P4 in almost every way except marketing speak. It was more power efficient. It also had a higher IPC count. (instruction per cycle) The 1ghz P3 beat out all the 1.6-1.8ghz P4s on introduction and so they just scrapped the P3s soon after because it didn't help their marketing. What kind of company scraps the better product?
The P3, by the way, should have been named the P2a or something since all that was changed was a few instructions and the cache size. But hey, 3 sounds better than 2.
Finally, the majority of developers no longer do optimizations by hand. So the "slight processor/OS incompatibility" shouldn't ever happen since almost every compiler for x86 is aware of both processors. The instruction set is the same. If the output is the same, it doesn't matter who's processor did it as long as 1+1=2 and 0xffffffff + 0x00000001 = (either 0 or an exception or whatever was specified by the ISA) Though,
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...
/I'm gonna go shoot myself.
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.
--- We need more Ron Paul!