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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, :\
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.
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.
Are you listening?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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."
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.
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
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
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!).
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
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
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".
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.