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."
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, :\
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.
The lead-in paragraph mentioned that Intel has like 82% of the market in the U.S.. I would guess that the rest of the world does not just automatically call Dell/HP when they need new computers.
The more work a person is willing to do to buy a computer, the greater chance they will purchase AMD. Someone who is just picking up a box with 'everything in it' might be more likely to see the 'Intel Inside' sticker on that new computer stacked 10 high at Best Buy.
Then again, my purchasing department doesn't seem to understand that there are computer makers other than Dell.
But what if I was in Italy- and buying from Dell was a pain in the ass? The chance of purchasing AMD just went up about 200 times.
No reason to lie.
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.
Intel is planning to release a 10.000 MHZ cpu and kick AMD poor lame ass.
Watch it, in several European countries (and a bunch of non-European ones) that truly does mean 10,000 MHz :)
We've come a long way from the "AMD is Dead" and "Intel Rules" days.
Intel let its marketing people get caught napping. Intel pushed the Itanium and said it will never make a 64-bit chip that is x86 compatible.
AMD came out with the 64 bit chip that was compatible with the x86, and it got rave reviews. And, it gets sales!
Now, AMD outsells Intel again. Did you see that -- the article said "again."
Not bad for a company that was being written off a couple years ago.
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.
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.
Are you listening?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Anyone who cares about using their computer for professional audio applications, for one.
Funny, we seem to have rather a lot of pro audio users on Macs, last I checked.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In my experience, AMD Athlon CPUs tend to perform better at video editing which is why I chose an FX-53 over a P4EE - it has much better memory bandwidth due to the memory controller being on the CPU instead of the northbridge and the FPU performance is usually superior.
Of course, there's always the 64-bit thing to take into consideration (and the no-execute extensions in Windows XP SP2).
Intel themselves admit that the only way they could make 64-bit desktop chips was by copying the AMD 64-bit extensions.
This is a 100% bonafide GOOD THING. Have you seen what these guys have done to each others margins? Have you seen how fast processor speeds have become these last 4 years? This is competition at its absolute finest.
Cheers to AMD for not giving up and dying. And cheers to that chairman of theirs who looks like he oughta be out selling chicken.
Well, it could have been anything; the video cards, the motherboards, the RAM, the power supplies, inadequate cooling or ventilation, who knows. Who put together the computers?
I am very doubtful that the actual CPU was the cause of any instabilities.
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
> Intels still run faster, even if they don't crunch the big numbers all in one cycle.
s/run\ faster/have\ higher\ clockspeeds
The unofficial
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..."
I'm very impressed with AMD and how it has evolved from a basic clone to an innovative competetor, and in my opinion, the better of Intel. My next system will be AMD, but really what are the benefits of Intel? Before it was the cool 'brand name' but now it just seems to be the bloated expensive version.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
s/run\ faster/have\ higher\ clockspeeds/ you forgot the last / My perl chokes on your subsitution regular expression.
Reserved Word.
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?
The article says that AMD's desktop successes are partially a result of Intel's tendency to emphasize notebooks. If "they" (Intel, I hope you mean) drive notebook sales upward, and assuming that damages desktop sales, Intel's sales would increase because of their notebook dominance and AMD's would decrease because of their desktop interests. Overall the desktop market would shrink (or grow less), while AMD's share of it might grow marginally as a result of the notebook market distracting Intel from pushing its desktop CPUs as aggressively. We might then have more "AMD Desktops Outsell Intel" stories, but it would definitely not be good news for AMD.
What exactly does EPIC provide, apart from a lot of work for compiler writers and a (theoretical) maximum 4-fold speed increase with current designs?
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
...
;)
You've been brainwashed by Intel. In almost all applications, a similarly priced Athlon 64, without 64-bit, wipes the floor against Intel. And in 64-bit compiles in Linux 64-bit, the Athlon 64 gets an extra 30-40% boost. Now obviously we won't get that in Windows, as most companies won't come out with 64-bit compiled versions. But hey... who uses Windows anyways?
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
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!).
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.
The purpose of HT is to make up for Intel's crappy super-long pipeline (something like 32 stages!? Someone correct me if I'm wrong). Whenever it does a jump, many instructions are wasted. AMD's pipeline on Barton was something like 12 stages, so there's much less wastage going on. All HT does is allow the wasted cycles to be used for another thread. Since AMD's processors don't waste so many instructions, HT wouldn't really help that much.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
(hint: they're actually innovating)
honnold.org - sometimes-rock band, all the time awesome forum
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
I'm also impressed with how far AMD has come. Part of me wants to see AMD clobber Intel, which had a monopoly for a long time, but it's probably best for each to have about 50% market share. It will keep both companies from getting fat and lazy, meaning more research and lower prices. Competition without a particular company dominating the market is generally a good thing for the consumer.
in the last 5 min?
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.
Coincidence? Naah...
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.
HT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) won't benefit AMD's chips as much as it does Intel's because of the way they are constructed.
/.)
Due to the P4's incredibly long pipeline (30-odd stages?) and very high clockspeed, if the branch prediction goes wrong, the chip will stall
HyperThreading is a clever hack that runs two simultaneous threads on the same die. In this way, if one thread stalls, the other can execute in it's place while the other thread waits for the pipeline to redo itself, hence being a very clever way of making up for the design "faults". AMD's typically run at a lower clockspeed, and have a much shorter pipeline, so even when their piplines stall, the chip does not waste as many cycles - in short, they;re not really designed to take advantage of SMT. Hence AMD not having SMT support is a bit of a non-issue.
(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a buff on chip architecture, this is just stuff I've picked up from reading
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
*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
Makes for a great headline, but it is not true at all, not even close.
No, it is true. However, it is also highly misleading, but that doens't make it false.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Intels still run faster, even if they don't crunch the big numbers all in one cycle.
Bullshit. A 1.6GHz Athlon will slaughter a 2.2GHz pentium 4 at most applications. The top-end Intel chip and the top-end AMD chip have roughly the same performance.
Uh oh.....time to start hating AMD.
Qxe4
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.
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).
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.
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.