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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.
Tezkah reports: Chef Tezkah holds the record this week for most meals sold! He captured 52% of the meal market for the first six months of 2005. Congratulations Chef Tezkah! Its important to note that this doesn't include any meals sold in restaurants, but good showing for Tezkah just the same.
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)
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!
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.
Why? Because they can't promise the same level of production as Intel does.
... 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.
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
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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.
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