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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!
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.