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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.
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
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# Modus Ponens
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When will they carry AMD? C'mon. This came out over a month ago.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
How much you wanna bet that 25% of the sales were people buying 2200+'s or the likes, and overclocking to 3100+?
I know I was one of them.
That factor alone may be why AMD was on top.
-Imidazole2
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.
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
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.
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
AMD is a 35 year old company whose stock has never grown.
You can make money off AMD by riding the highs, but not as a long term investor.
Incorrect...this includes all PCs sold at retail channels.
"Desktop PCs with processors from Advanced Micro Devices outsold desktops based on processors from Intel in U.S. retail channels for the week ending April 24, according to research released late last week from Current Analysis. "
The very first line in the original article.
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 day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel.
You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house. Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time. The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth. They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing.
As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line? There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon. There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors.
There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses. AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers.
To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube). AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term.
As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia? Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA. And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is. The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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...
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!