Slashdot Mirror
AMD Desktops Outsell Intel
prostoalex writes "For the week ending August 21st AMD managed to capture 54% market share among new desktops sold. Intel's share during the week was 45%. While Intel leads the U.S. CPU market with 82.7% market share, folks from AMD are proud to announce this is the second week this year - they also outsold Intel on the desktop market one time in April 2004."
Its for desktops selling within the retail channel. And Intel does have around 80 market share overall - its just that this past week AMD machines outsold Intel for some reason.
Maybe for enthusiast and home gaming PCs, but if you include business desktops I'd venture to say that Intel still carries somewhere around 75%.
The blurb itself says that despite AMD's share of new CPUs, Intel have 82.7% of the US market. Which is close enough to 72%.
The article itself admits that AMD's market is 'constrained' such that these results are very impressive. Intel indeed makes AMD a clear underdog for businesses and (at least up until very recently) notebooks.
ATI mainly outsold Nvidia because of Nvidia's shoddy manufacturing of early Geforce 5 series cards - poor drivers, drivers that lied, and late to market hardware that looked distinctly weak by the time it was public. This was a direct mirror of the emergence of Nvidia over 3DFX as a major graphics card force a few years ealier, with the exception that this time around, Nvidia had a lot greater cash reserve than 3DFX ever did, so could actually afford to make the mistake.
As it is, I'd be very surprised to find out that the ATI share was more than 55/45 in their favor (remember - a LOT of people outside of hardcord gamer circles are still using early Geforce / TNT cards - I have even seen Geforce 2 *MX* cards still being sold as low cost no frills acceleration) and with the new 6600 cards coming out, this is going to be a firm kick to the nether regions of ATI. There just isn't a card on the market that can hold a candle to it, and when you combine this with Nvidia's far superior Doom 3 performance, I'd certainly not bet against Nvidia becoming a dominant 3D acceleration force over the next few years.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
The VIA KT600 chipset is definitely slower than the exceptional NForce 2 chipset.
It is also cheaper.
Anything Intel blows goats compared to a decent Nforce 2 board.
One of the major complaints I have about my XP2500+ is that the thing runs hot, like really hot. We hit a heatwave locally and temperatures were up to about 40 celcius at peak. My CPU actually hit 95 celcius (for those that use Fahrenheit, 100 celcius is boiling temperature).
I have a bigass thermaltake fan in there now, which I can turn down when the weather is cooler. The computer is still rather noisy.
My point to all this is not AMD bashing however. Apparently the 64-bit CPUs do much better for heat dissipation. The CPU die is much larger (the actual die is small on an 32-bit Athlon), so heat dissipates much more nicely into the heatsink due to the increased surface contact area. When I do upgrade, I'll be going AMD64... more power (in 'nix anyhow) and cooler running than my current CPU.
AMD numbers are based on (mostly?) retail sales.
All of Dell sales are direct.
Most of HP sales are direct.
Most of IBM sales are direct.
Most of Intel sales are direct.
I am referring to desktops in the gov, and corp market, as well as direct to customer sales.
So yes, AMD sells more retail.
Retail sales overall are a decreasing percentage of the desktop sales figures.
Makes for a great headline, but it is not true at all, not even close.
AMD does not have anywhere near the production capacity Intel has, and both are cranking out full steam ahead.
So do the math yourself.
if AMD has 20% of the capacity of Intel, and both are maxed out, who sells more?
wake up and hold your nose
I wouldn't say that Intel has everything wrapped up. comparing a Xeon to a 3800+ is hardly fair as you are comparing a server processor to a desktop one. Now if you compared it to say, an Opteron (a much more fair comparison), well then you'd see AMD still wins or pulls up even.
What's more, the more processors, the better. Hypertransport gives each processor it's own bus.
That said, comparing an FX-53 to a 3.8 GHz Intel would also be a more fair comparison. And while it's true that the Intel wins it's share of benchmarks, keep in mind: You are comparing a 3.8 GHz Intel chip to a lousy 2.6 GHz processor (the FX-53). Theoretically, the Intel should totally kick it's ass - but it doesn't. That's some good chip design there my friend!
I just got a 3800+ last week. All I can say is: WOW!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
where are all those intel favourable benchmarks?*
lots of amd favourable ones
in my personal experience, Intel's always have a small lag that is quite noticeable. Although this is comming from the same person who can tell a 85hz refresh rate from a 75 so its probably not something most people have to worry about.
and THEN there is the huge price difference
*(i wouldn't personally count office benchmarks like word but i know intel has a weird history of doing well in those)
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Actually, the lead paragraph mistakenly says the 82% figure is US -- it's not, it's ~82% worldwide.
The AMD > 50% figures are specific to US Retail sales, so they are totally uncomparable numbers.
Raw CPU speeds are fairly meaningless.
Its like the RPM guage on your car. Lets say that a Corvette has a lower RPM per mile per hour than a Porche and it also costs less. Now lets pretend that they both top out at 165 mph. If all you're worried about is how fast you get from point A to point B (and what else is there when talking about CPUs?), then the Corvette obviously gets you more bang per buck. Who cares if the Porche has higher RPM per MPH (its actually a bad thing!).
(hint: they're actually innovating)
honnold.org - sometimes-rock band, all the time awesome forum
Whenever it does a jump, many instructions are wasted
No. Branches generally do not cause a pipeline flush. (This is why branch prediction is a hot topic.)
HT does not exist to operate only in pipeline stalls. HT exists because analysis demonstrates that most x86 programs do not exhibit enough parallelism to fully utilitize all of the multiple execution units in a modern Pentium. You've got a lot of silicon devoted to peak performance that isn't used all the time, because you don't happen to have (for example) a bunch of full-width add instructions going on at the same time. HT allows a second thread to use those chip resources.
HT is cheaper than building two processor cores, as lots of the instruction fetch and decode logic is shared. Putting two complete cores on the same die does not increase the efficiency of utilization of the resources in either core. Dual core is much more of a brute force solution to the problem (a complaint AMD fans usually lodge against Intel). In this case, execution units in both cores will often be idle, as neither thread alone happens to need the full capability of a single core.
Since you've spent more silicon on the problem, dual core can have performance advantages -- specifically whereever you actually need that duplicate logic that would be shared with a HT design. Often, however, that extra fetch/decode logic is going to waste as well.
HT is an elegant optimization for a modern superscalar processor. It is not, however, the same thing as a dual processor, nor does it solve exactly the same problem.
*I don't like KDE all that much either, but then again I'm also not a big fan of GNOME
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What about power consumption?
Get an MSI K8T Neo motherboard with an Athlon64. It can automatically vary its CPU speed from 800Mhz to its full rated speed (2Ghz+). So if you have its throttling control turned on, you don't worry about the Athlon64's maximum power consumption because it rarely runs at max speed. Best of all, although you turn this on or off in the bios, its controlled on the motherboard, so it works in either Windows or Linux (no software drivers).
At work we had this Dell XPS running a 3.4 ghz p4. That thing ran hot as hell. We had problems with the machine when it was rendering for 3dsmax and when we opened the case the heatsink was very hot. Actually, it was a pretty crappy heatsink considering the cost and thermal needs of th 3.4 ghz p4. Anyway, I'm assuming your joke was to point out how hot AMD's can get, well Intel chips can get very hot themselves.
The white box store I'm working at sells 9 AMD's for every P4. Bang for the buck is the rule for home and small business. AMD has Intel whipped by that standard.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.