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."

Comments

Notebook sales

[erick99]

It seems that AMD's success on these occasions are due to notebook sales:

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

Good to hear!

[TheKubrix]

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, :\

Re:Including businesses?

[Hawkxor]

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.

Re:Including businesses?

[bigman2003]

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.

A Long Way from "AMD is Dead"

[dragon_imp]

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.

Re:A Long Way from "AMD is Dead"

[melted]

>> Intel let its marketing people get caught napping.

To the contrary. Intel let its marketing people tell the engineers what to do. So they basically said, "we want a 3GHz chip, because consumers are stupid and they only look at GHz figures". P4 is a result of this. It's only real feature is that it can be clocked insanely high. Clock for clock it's not only dumber than AMD chips, it's also dumber than some of Intel's own processors (Pentium M for example).

Figures

[chaffed]

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.

Ah, that explains Intel pimping a new Internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't beat 'em, change games.

Re:Who would buy intel?

[jcr]

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

Whether you like Intel or AMD or neither

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Including businesses?

[rcamans]

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?

Re:Including businesses?

[Silverlancer]

...

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? ;)

Re:Who would buy intel?

[Lord Kano]

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

Re:HT

[spuzzzzzzz]

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.

Hot On Their Heels

[bgumm]

I just read this InfoWorld article, which had a pretty good account of how AMD is starting to make progress against Intel.

(hint: they're actually innovating)

global warming

[tasinet]

On another page, global warming is still rising at an alarming pace.

Coincidence? Naah...

Re:Including businesses?

[servoled]

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.