AMD Tops Intel in U.S. Retail Sales

jimmydins writes "According to digitimes.com, AMD Surpassed Intel in US Retail Sales for the month of September." From the article: "After facing what seemed an insurmountable decline in desktop PC sales during the first six months of 2005, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) captured a 52% share of the US retail desktop PC market in September, according to Current Analysis. AMD's performance during the back-to-school shopping season topped chip giant Intel's 46% share by six points, said the market research firm. Despite its past successes in surpassing Intel desktop sales in select retail sales weeks, September 2005 marked the first time AMD was able to outperform Intel for an entire month, the research firm stated." In order to keep this in perspective, C|Net points out that this doesn't include direct PC sales, so no Dell sales are included in these numbers. Good showing for AMD just the same, though.

Comments

AMD is Growing

[CSHARP123]

I agree that this survey do not give the whole picture. AMD is growing you all got to see their third quarter profit

Re:fuzzy (2-bit?) math

[Surt]

In case you (or someone reading this) really doesn't know:

Dell is the worlds largest PC seller, with $49 billion in sales last year.

They ship 0% of their systems with AMD processors, due to some unholy deal they made with intel.

Re:Interesting results..

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD CPUs have always been reliable. The urban legend that AMD CPUs are unstable started in the early 2000s because there was a heap of Socket A motherboards produced with misimplemented VIA chipsets that caused system instability and disk corruption. This was VIA and the motherboard companies' faults, but AMD received the blame and it has stuck.

AMD CPUs have fewever bugs and run cooler than Intel's.

Perhaps not now...

[WidescreenFreak]

Why? Because they can't promise the same level of production as Intel does.

AMD just opened a new manufacturing facility in Germany that, if I recall correctly, will be able to product 100 million more chips per year. Whether that's CPUs or IC chips I don't know, but it's clear that AMD is growing. That's still not going to overtake Intel any time soon, but it's encouraging.

And so what if AMD doesn't produce their own motherboards? Okay, Intel has the facilities to do both. So what? Why does that matter? Dell doesn't manufacture their own hard drives or memory chips or ... just about anything that goes into a Dell PC. Why do you hold AMD to standards that are not required for other electronics manufacturers? As long as AMD has an open relationship with other motherboard manufacturers where technical specs are available to make appropriate motherboards, then so what if AMD doesn't make their own? If certain mobo manufacturers don't make quality products, then don't buy from them. Buy from competitors. Don't blame AMD for bad products from other companies.

Re:Perhaps not now...

[dmadole]

I like AMD, my first system that I built myself was a k6 350 and it is still chugging along today. But only 128MB of ram is cachable by the chipset, and that makes many things slower than they should be. Another point where my P2 450 beats the AMD just because of a shit chipset.

It's such an old relic of an anecdote that I don't know why I bother responding, but...

The AMD K6 was a socket 7 CPU, the same as the Pentium. AMD did not make any chipsets at the time; the same chipsets were used that were used for Pentium motherboards, made by the likes of SIS and VIA, and yes, Intel. I have had several machines with AMD processors on boards with Intel chipsets.

In fact, the amount of time that AMD was able to continue using socket 7 was quite an acheivement. The K6-2+, K6-III, and K6-III+ (at up to 550Mhz) all included on-chip cache, which made the motherboard caching largely irrelevant, as it now became level-3 cache. And the on-chip cache ran at full core clock speed, unlike the P2s at half-speed. P2 chipsets do not do any caching, the cache is part of the processor module, although a separate chip except in the case of the last generation of mobile P2s, when it finally moved on-chip at full speed.

So in reality, in the era of the P2 you are comparing to, AMD still had an arguably superior product that also avoided the need to reinvest in new motherboards, chipsets, and tooling like you had to on the P2 technology path. Too bad you are comparing the P2 to the original K6 which represents a prior generation.

I'm going to just go out on a limb here ...

[SuperDuG]

But don't most "hobbiest" or "enthusiasts" or "people who build their own computer", shop around? I mean if you have the common sense enough to build your own computer, then you're doing it because you know you'll save money. It's been long known that you get "more bang for the buck" from AMD, so this just seems like something that is becoming more of a mainstream "known".

People still buy from Dell, but more and more people are building their own systems, or having someone build one for them.

Now for people to argue with me about how much "bang" you get for a "buck" ....

Note: Take into account the amount of money saved through popular amd chipsets (IE: nforce). It's not a lot, but it is something. Plus you're cool because you have something your neighbors don't which is nearly priceless.

Re:Interesting results..

[mr_zonules]

"Their more general components have been found in early and current (Mac mini) Apple computers and numerous other electronic devices." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD I don't think they're saying that AMD PROCESSORS are in the Mac Mini, but rather other components made by AMD.

Re:How much does AMD pay Intel in royalties

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time Intel spends several billion dollars devising a new instruction set, AMD knocks off a copy.

AFAIK the last update of x86 - x86-64 was copied by Intel from AMD.

Somewhat meaningful

[DaEMoN128]

Let us look at these numbers. They exclude most of the market (I know very few people that buy retail computers). I am not suprized that AMD beat intel in the retail market. Most people that are buying preconfigured boxes from a retail store are usually looking for a cheap computer. AMD will win in this case.
I think this is a sign that AMD is getting a shelf presence. That is it. 5 years ago, you couldn't find a computer with AMD inside it without doing some serious looking. Now you can find 4 out of 9 on walmarts computer page. I personally build only with AMD for now, but I have no issue with Intel processors (other than the loss of my left arm to pay for it). It is a good sign that AMD is becoming mainstream to the public, not just the enthusiast.

It should only be a couple of years more before Dell ships an AMD system. HP, shuttle, alienware, velocity micro, and monarch already do. I dont know about Gateway 2000.

all in all, Good for AMD!

FYI, 1 Athlon XP, 1 Duron, 1 G4, 2 Xenon, and 1 P4M at home.

Re:Retail is the word here

[manno]

"They do not produce their own motherboards, and while some third-party manufacturers produce some great silicon, most are abobinable pieces of flaky crap."

"most" huh?

I have made dozens of A-64/A-XP PC's in my day, and I've used motherboards made by Tyan, MSI, Asus, AsRock, Abit, Biostar, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and ECS. Using Chipsets by AMD, Uli, Nvidia, and Via. And out of the 100+ boards I've been shipped I've only had problems with 2 that weren't my responsibility. With one and only one exception and that's if I installed Nvidia's Software IDE Driver, that being said I've experienced similar issues with Intel's Software IDE drive, called "Intel Application Accelerator" or something like that. So I call that a wash, and don't install either.

How do you define most... for argument's sake lets say that I'm lucky, and assume normal return rates with electronic goods, when I was in the distribution biz, we expected 20% of all of our electronics to come back whether it was defective or otherwise. So let's put it at 20% how on Earth does 20% constitute "most"? You literally don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.

Let's continue shall we?

"when you consider than the vast majority of PCs sold in America and troughout the world are trought direct sales (say Dell) as the Ed implied, and through wholesale (Businesses), AMD is marginalized.

Why? Because they can't promise the same level of production as Intel does. They do not produce their own motherboards, "

Do you think Dell buys Intel manufactured motherboards? Wrong! One of Dell's largest suppliers for cases/Mobos ect. is Foxconn/Hon Hi, In fact one of the major suppliers for every PC manufacture sprawling from Dell, to Intel, to even that sacred cow Apple is Foxconn/Hon Hai. Please post "facts" on just the topics you understand.

mod -1 FUD

-manno

Re:Not really surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably meant Sony video software (Vegas). A few I know like it a lot.

Not related to topics, but personally I think all these video tools (from adobe, sony, etc.) on Windows are crap because they are not stable enough. You shouldn't need to take a coffee break because your machines require a daily reboot! Some might say that is the nature of the OS, but the Windows running these tools are a lot worse than the others.

Vive la revolución! Vive Hector!

[Eukariote]

Today, AMD opened Fab 36. It is a 300mm Fab that will top out at twice the capacity of their current 200mm Fab 30. It will ramp over the next two years. That means they'll be able to serve half of the market. Up from 18% or so, now. In addition, they have arrangements for outsourcing production to Chartered Semi, if there is even more demand to cope with.

Add to that superior CPU products in the desktop, mobile, and server space as well as OEM's that seem to have lost their fear of Intel retalition, and what we have here is a revolution that will unseat Intel from its monopoly position.

Re:Not really surprising

[Paul Jakma]

That said: I never saw an AMD commercial in my whole life. Do they exist?

They seem to focus on sports sponsorship deals and advertising at sports events. They used to have ads at a lot of football matches, British premiership particularly and some international matches. They also used to sponsor Liverpool FC. Additionally, they sponsor both Ferrari in F1 and Ducati in MotoGP (though, the logo is barely noticeable on the Ducati motoGP bike). They've also had hoardings at F1 races. Also, they apparently sponsor (or did) some rugby club.