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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.
What this says is that AMD is making serious inroads on Intel. Just a few years ago, AMD beating Intel at anything, by any metric, would have been laughable.
I think it is not so surprising that AMD sells more Retail CPUs than Intel, considering their cheap prices, their great performance and the cheapness of their motherboards/chipsets. They are the perfect home system. However, 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, and while some third-party manufacturers produce some great silicon, most are abobinable pieces of flaky crap. For most mom'n'pop users at home, stability and performance don't matter too much, and those $40-60 MoBos are a bargain.
Anyway, props to AMD for their successes!
Not quite as interesting though as "Excite.com makes comeback, surpasses Google in usage". Grr slow news day. Hrmm is AMD gear as reliable these days as Intel? That's always been why I've gone Intel.. And I just read that mac-Mini's use AMD.. Could this be giving them a big boost?
~jennifer.k~
..... Does this make AMD money? After all, the comsumer computer business tends to have VERY low margins. AFAIK, AMD doesn't have much mindshare in the moneymaking enterprise market (although to be fair they are trying to push that at the moment) So if AMD is discounting the hell out of these chips to gain mindshare, are they making money? If not, how long can they continue to do so?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Laptops are now outselling desktops, and AMD has lagged behing Intel in its portable chips designs. Now, a breakdown based on the numbers of CPUs shipped would be interesting.
Make love, not reality television.
While I think a full out celebration would be premature, this same set of numbers showing an increase from a previous data set is still a positive sign...isn't it?
Greatness. It comes in many forms, sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice - that's the loneliest form.
Who builds a PC himself with an Intel CPU anyway? ;-)
thos of us that are forced to becuase all current video editing apps (prosumer not the cheeze crap that coesm with cameras and firewire cards) require Intel P4.
I can not wait until Sony Vegas comes out as 64 bit for AMD next year. I'll drop this Adobe crap like a hot potato for that and jump on the AMD 64 bandwagon fast. (still wish I could get MAC editing platform as cheap as a wintel platform)
Adobe Premiere Pro does not work well under AMD. they have Intel specific code in the rendering that causes performance issues. Same goes for Canopus and Sony vegas as of the current versions.
Some of us use their computers for work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who's to say what's meaningful? For example, auto manufacturers have often met production milestones by stuffing huge numbers of a particular model into their captive auto rental subsidiaries. Are the market share numbers that include those artificially created purchases more meaningful than the sales numbers for dealer sales to individuals? It depends on what aspect picture you're interested in.
Commercial Idea (c) myself 2005, i hereby grant exclusive, permanent, non-revokable license for use to AMD.
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The typical hare and turtle cartoon race. But they're in racing cars. The Hare starts first in its "Famous inside" car. The turtle starts next, and its car reads: "AMD powered."
The race starts, and we see the hare pushing the gas to the bottom. But when it looks back, there's no turtle! Where is it? Oh, the turtle just crossed the finish line! The hare's jaw drops as the turtle is already being cheered by the fans and given the gold medal.
The hare opens the race car, and sees (instead of the engine), an AMD CPU.
The tagline: "AMD. Faster." (When the phrase is said, the background switches to a bar chart comparing "AMD" and "Other", showing AMD is faster)
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Seriously, if AMD wants to win the market, they should start making TV and radio commercials. Remember what happened to the Amiga. It was a superior product, but lack of marketing lead to bankruptcy.
Only when customers start asking for "AMD processors", vendors will start using them.
Perhaps more important to note is that major manufacturers are creating and stores are stocking enough well-featured AMD-based computers to achieve this landmark of retail sales. This would not have been possible several years ago.
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On behalf of the less-bigoted, may I say I am ecstatic that there are two (three?) cpu companies to choose from. This means I can buy whoever's cpus are currently the best and that there is competition to make them all try harder. For those of you who [hate Intel | love AMD | hate AMD | love Intel] I only hope you actually benefit from this chauvinism. Perhaps you have shares in one or the other. Perhaps you work for one or the other. Whatever. The rest of us should be buying on the merits of whatever is currently available. I am buying AMD64 cpus at the moment. Prior to that I was buying AMD Athlons. Prior to that I was buying Pentium IIIs. I have also had good success with Cyrix in the past. Lave the bigots to scream and shout. Please buy on technical merits. May the best cpu manufacturer of the moment win.
If by "due to the fact that AMD has nowhere near the capacity to supply Dell" you mean "they have to provide every processor for every model, no ifs, ands or buts" and "0% is the same as >0% but since they can't supply Dell in their entirety they get nothing", then you'd have a point.
I run the IT deparment at a not-for-profit clinc,
~40 users with xp (at $6 per license [techsoup.org])
1 Linux user (myself)
1 Win sever
4 Linux servers
all _AMD_ white boxes, except couple of intel laptops
except one hd once in a while, and a network card, nothing failed in three years so far,
I am always praised for money/features outcomes.
Well, you can't dismiss a number just because you don't like it. Any metric, compared to itself over time is called a TREND. Trends are more important than most of the worthless data you get thrown at you every day. The fact is that in this channel (retail PC's) AMD has for the first time sold more units than Intel, where 5-7 years ago, they were just a blip on the radar. That is a significant trend and you can bet that the people running Intel are paying attention and sleeping a lot less than they used to. The only relevant question is how has the retail PC channel changed over the time you are looking at. I would guess that it has gotten larger in unit volume sales, just like the direct channels, which is even more telling. Lets face it, AMD is outmanouvering Intel and Intel doesn't know what to do about it. Remember when Invidia used to be unbeatable for graphics CPU's? Now ATI is the king.
BTW, this AMD vs. Intel competition is AWSOME for us users, it is capitalism at its best.