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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.
Seems like an incredibly flawed survey.
Fun to play with numerical, isn't it?
What a ridiculous article. Retail sales are meaningless without integrating direct sales (Dell, etc). I run two retail stores (not in IT) and if you based anything on my sales and ignored our e-commerce competition, you'd be predictably wrong.
First, retailers will generally maximize margins buy promoting less expensive costing products. E-commerce generally runs tight margins on everything.
Example: Intel Retail PC retails for $799, cost is $619. AMD Retail PC retails for $749, cost is $549. The retailer sees a $10 better margin on the AMD but reduces gross sales. Which one will the consumer pick, generally? Whatever is cheap.
Don't believe any sales figures any more. They're ignorant of the true market, which is retail, e-commerce, eBay, and buying in pieces from your local OEM "wholesaler."
Just basing figures like these on whatever market gives you the best results is more to keep shareholders happy.
So, exactly what victory is had here? AMD beat Intel in retail sales? Is that units (cpu's) shipped? Is it gross sales? And, the article says this doesn't include direct sales from vendors like Dell. Hwah? That sounds like a pretty large chunk of total sales of processors to be glibly claiming victory. What percentage of Dell's PCs ship with Intel vs. AMD and what effect does that have on the total numbers?
As for winning in retail sales, to me this is more market spin (seemingly of which many slashdot articles are) and little real information. When I talk to people who are going to buy, or have bought a PC recently I virtually never hear them discussing the finer points of their decision to buy a particular brand or processor, mostly because 99% of PC consumers don't know and don't care what the processor is (though they really should when it comes to something like a Celeron).
So to me this just means AMD has been successful in getting their products on the eye-level shelves in the stores. Customers are buying what looks sexy, and what costs the least.
I've been happy with a couple of AMD machines I've purchased and I like that AMD continues to compete with Intel and hope AMD keeps Intel from becoming the Microsoft of the chip industry (some claim they already have), but I can't pull much real or meaningful information from this article.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Selectively choose the input data set, and I can make the numbers say anything.
The other end of the computer-buying public are gamers, who already know that they better go with a top-notch AMD64. Those people don't ask me anything anyway, but AMD is simply "the gamers choice".
Intels customer base only are OEM manufacturers that target the business market. They still get credit for being more stable, which I don't understand because all my AMD machines - from a K6-II 333Mhz, over 2xAMD MP 2400+ to a couple of AMD64 (2400+ to 3400+) just run perfectly fine.
The other consumers are those that don't ask their Geek friends and only know Intel from the commercials, so it "must be good". (They also think that "Centrino" is a processor, because of the sticker on their machine). That said: I never saw an AMD commercial in my whole life. Do they exist?
AMD just kicks in the performance/€ factor, and CPU performance has become less important in the last few years. So if you want to save some money, just buy a slower CPU. It's just that simple. ;-)
Oh, I just see that it doesn't include OEM machines (sorry, didn't read the story entirely). Most definately AMD will kick in the self-buidling crowd. AMD is popular with them... (performance/€ + easy overclocking possibilities. Who builds a PC himself with an Intel CPU anyway?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
There's no doubt that this is only a portion of the battle between the two manufacturers, but the point is that 5 years ago, AMD was getting slaughtered by every measure. They weren't even a factor.
Now, they've caught up to Intel by atleast a couple metrics. That's not insignificant, especially considering that retail sales have a strong correlation to "mindshare" amongst consumers, as pointed out by a sibling poster.
It doesn't matter what set of data was picked.
Comparing Apple's to Apple's in the same data set, AMD won. Period.
And no, I don't think it's indicitive of the actual market, but it is a noteworthy sign. (pun anyone?)
Intel's strong suit right now is its laptop processors, and who buys those at retail? AMD's strong suit are desktop processors, which are what people put into home built computers.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
After 10+ years of being a pure Intel shop sans some toaster applicances, we have been a pure Intel shop when it comes to personal computers.
We just switched to AMD. We purchased 100 in the last month. I can get a feature rich AMD for $100 less than a feature poor power hungry Intel. $100x100 units a month adds up.
The HP dx5150 sff are great little machines for workstation use.
It's not like they hide the fact that it's only retail sales. It tells you different things than a "whole computer market" survey. What a "complete" survey would include isn't exactly clear either, would big iron fit in? Anyway, retail is a good number for seeing what home users are doing in the marketplace. Yes, some home users go to Dell, but by in large, they buy retail. So, in the past when AMD's share was smaller and shrinking, we could guess that Intel's "Intel Inside" or "Centrino" or big Mhz or something else was working. Now, with AMD share growing, either the home consumer is thinking more highly of AMD, or maybe they just don't know either way and buy whatever is on the shelves.
Anyway, my point is that this survey is as valid as any other as long as you think of it in the proper perspective.
I have personally done benchmarking of some compilers on AMD64s. I can't reveal the results but the bottomline, AMD's performance was far better than Intels. It Rocks!
I think it was a pain even at Microsoft to port their software to Intels Itanium. They have said that support for it will be limited in Longhorn. Regarding Media Center, I think Dave first ported to AMD64 and Acer was marketing the combination.
Their are some serious issues with Intel and not many liked it including Linus Trovalds and he blasted INTEL in one of his e-mails for not giving credit to AMD.(Dig through Kernel archive)
I like free market and competition. It was the WinTel lobby but these suckers somehow managed to escape from slashdoters, I am glad they are now losing.
Personally I don't care what AMD or Intel's exact market shares are, I do however take this as a sign that the market is in a very good place. We have two companies in relatively comparable strong positions and several smaller companies filling out the niche markets (Via, Transmeta ...) and they all run the same code. It's also finally gotten to the point where the market dictates the course of the standard instead of just one company (Intel borrowing the x64 extentions from AMD). The companies are proffitable and the customer has choice. I can only wish the OS market looked like this.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org