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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."
Duboise continues: "promotions continue to be the driving force behind retail PC sales and AMD's successes. In fact, $699 notebook promotions have been the driving force behind three incidents this year when notebook sales were able to overcome desktop sales. As long as Intel continues to place more emphasis on the more lucrative and successful notebook market, it leaves the door open for AMD's desktop wins."
I wonder if they believe that they can eventually drive notebook sales upward to the point that they outsell Intel more often than a handful of times a year?
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
First ATI outsold Nvidia on desktops, and now this! Good to see theres not a monopoly on core hardware components! now if only software were the same way, :\
I was an ardent fan of intel until the Athlon 64 came out. My brothers new PC has an Athlon 64 along with other goodies (1gig ram, dual layer dvd writer...) for a very reasonable $1,000 USD.
There is no way I could have done that with an intel chip and motherboard and still get the same performance.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you can't beat 'em, change games.
Are you listening?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have an N2U400A from ECS. It is a cheap ass mobo, but when I get it installed and running I was surprised at how sweet the NForce 2 Ultra chipset is. Fast, and I do mean FAST and stable. I put some stress on my system. I'll run the distributed.net client in the background, while I have a VPN connection open to the database server, I'll be importing records into that database, A VNC session running, and all while while playing Counter Strike in the foreground. System stays smooth and responsive.
Via needs to change something, because the NForce chipset is kicking ass all over their offerings for only a few dollars more.
I was kind of wary when I heard that NVidia was releasing a mobo chipset, I thought that since they were a "video card" company that they wouldn't be able to make a good chipset. I am so glad I was wrong. Now, I'd like to see what ATI can do.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Uh, this is a VERY well known problem with Via 686B Southbridges (among others) and Creative labs soundcards. Neither company knows how to follow the PCI 2.0 or 2.1 spec and so burst data transfers done by the sound card are corrupted. Some Firewire cards also have problems transfering to the iPod for the same reason. The problems were enough to put me off VIA permenantly. I now use SiS chipsets for my AMD systems and have had no problems (I don't need any of the expensive integrated stuff from a NForce board).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I posted in a reply that doesn't appear to be getting modded up, so:
The figures for Intel's total share are worldwide, not US. (I should know, my company is the source cited in the link.) Meanwhile the AMD weekly share data (from another company) is for US Retail system sales. So the two data points really aren't comparable on any basis.
I know the figures I cite are exclusive to x86 CPUs. Someone mentioned PowerPC in this thread, and Apple provides sales figures as part of their financials -- based on Q2 data, PowerPCs in Apples comprise about 1.8% of the market if you included them in the calculations.
As I understand it (which may be fulla holes) the N/S bridge chipset matters a lot. Professional audio apps are notorious for having problems on the PC platform and the problem is that the PC platform was not designed with realtime (or even psuedo realtime) constraints in mind.
Even if you have a pro audio card that does a/d conversion, the data still has to get from the card to HDD fast enough. The system is probably way more than fast enough on average, but you get pops anyway if some other process keeps the cpu busy long enough for a buffer somewhere to fill up.
The chipset is key because audio is much more i/o intensive than compute intensive. So, the bottlenecks are definitely on the i/o bus (or maybe memory bus? I dunno.). I would guess that any pro audio app will have code that's been hand tuned to work with the patterns of latency typical in intel hardware.
But still, cheers to AMD for kicking some flabby, complacent, celeron-crippling, market-segmenting, mhz-is-everything intel ass.
-chris
-cbare
The problem with this comparison is that car engines are not like CPUs.
The advantage of higher-revving engines is that you can generate the same power (not torque) with a smaller sized engine. Notice that Formula 1 cars have extremely high-revving engines--usually over 10,000 rpm. In race cars like that, engine size and weight is extremely important. In F1, in fact, the engine size is actually critical in determining the shape of the body, and severely affects aerodynamics.
Higher-revving engines, properly engineered, also allow better fuel economy because of their smaller frictional loss. This is important if you only use the peak power output capability of your engine very rarely, and spend most of your time cruising at a normal speed in high gear. With variable valve timing and variable cam phasing technologies, you can build a smaller engine that gets excellent fuel economy at low rpms, and very high power output at high rpms; the best of both
worlds.
The only big disadvantage to higher rpms is, of course, durability, but modern mechanical engineering, metallurgical, and manufacturing practices easily make up for this.
With CPU speeds, however, the raw clockspeed is only one variable in how well the chip performs, but is also directly proportional to how much power the chip consumes. So if you engineer a crappy CPU which has a high clockspeed, but doesn't use those cycles effectively, you'll only succeed in wasting more electricity than the lower-MHz competitor which has a more efficient architecture.
Part right. nVidia didn't bother getting a license to do intel. We know the technology worked - just look at XBox. I don't think they revealed any particular reason for not pushing intel harder for a license, although it may have been some strange crosslicensing issues with Xbox and Microsoft. Also, it's possible that nVidia wanted to test the water with AMD's CPUs first, and found that market successful enough. Anyone with AMD would know that nVidia dominate the chipset market for AMD - and for good reason, the performance and stability are unmatched.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Smaller engine=less area=less heat.
That rule would seem to be inverted for CPUS.
Actually, it's not.
Power consumption in CPUs is dictated by clock speed, die size, and feature size (90nm, 130nm, 180nm, etc.).
If you were to take the old Pentium II design, and re-engineer it for the modern 90nm process (or better yet, the upcoming 65nm), you'd be able to shrink it down to a smaller die size. This would yield both a smaller physical chip (which would be cheaper to produce because it's using less silicon), and lower power consumption, assuming you ran it at the same 300 MHz or so that the old P2s ran at.
The problem is that chip companies and consumers don't care about lower power consumption; they want faster performance, or more precisely, they want bigger numbers so they can brag to their friends and feel like they're doing better than the Joneses. So while going to smaller feature sizes helps reduce power consumption, going to a higher clock speed more than makes up for it, so the actual power consumption is continually rising.
Even worse, with transistors becoming ever smaller, the heat they produce is being concentrated into smaller regions, which causes localized heat problems on the chip, necessitating more engineering solutions to keep those areas from overheating. If you look at a thermal map of a CPU in operation, you'll see that a very small part of the CPU is generating the majority of the heat--the ALU and execution units, which are constantly utilized, produce most of the heat, while the SRAM cache produces very little even though it probably accounts for a majority of the die real estate.
For plain GHz monsters, AMD simply is the better price/performance deal. Now lets look at the situation from a different angle. Intel has a kick ass processor in their line. Yes the Pentium-M faster than most except the high end P4s only sold in servers and laptop computers. Outside of the US there is a huge market for machines which save energy (well in the US nobody thinks about energy, except for a god given right to be consumed probably) But the market currently is dominated by the rather measly VIA CPUs which have a huge following over here in Europe (and probably Asia) Well AMD currently reacts to the trend with their own line of new fast energy savers (which we will see probably in desktop boards soon, but definitely not from via :-) )
Via currently sells boatloads of their C3 stuff, and Transmeta probably would also if their stuff was available.
So where is Intel in that game. Basically nowhere, Intel itself says this is a notebook processor only.
Some third companies already produce industrial boards because the advantages of the PM over other intel designs are huge, blazingly fast, with a rather low power consumption. But those boards cost a fortune.
But the end user market is left to VIA. What happens here is basically the same thing Intel did in the 64 bit market, which basically was handed over to AMD. And if AMD can get their act together and have several companies producing boards in the ATX format using their new low powere cores, they basically will win the slowly but rapidly emerging home server market, which currently is a hobbyists market, but in a few years will become the mass market.