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Intel Admits To Falling Behind AMD
Vicegrip writes "CNN is carrying a Fortune story covering an analyst meeting held on Thursday. There, CEO Otellini admitted Intel has fallen behind AMD with lost market share, technological leadership, and recently profitability. Intel also announced cuts to 1 Billion in spending." From the article: "Intel's market share recently slipped below 80%, and Otellini strongly emphasized the need for market share gains in all his remarks. On the other hand, he also suggested that Intel's recent market share losses (to AMD, whose name was not mentioned) were in line with historical variations which tracked to Intel's product generations."
Intel has three fabs ramping to 65 then 45 nm
Intel has always had a process technology advantage over AMD. That never stopped AMD from shipping competitive products. Also, note that AMD's fab situation has gotten a lot better in the last year - with Fab 36 (and soon Chartered), AMD has the capacity to take on Intel in the market - something that they just couldn't do in the early Athlon days.
AMD has always been conservative in launching new processes, and it has benifited them in the past. Intel's 90nm process turned out to be the nail in the Prescott coffin, but AMD's 90nm launch resulted in CPUs that clocked much higher, used less power, and cost less money.
nothing on the horizion for 2 more years
K8L, for one. Dual-core Turions. 65nm in 1Q 2007. Quad-core in 2007.
two years worth of products that handily defeat anything from AMD
Ah, another Intel Conroe fanboy. While I'd agree that Conroe is looking quite good, note that Athlon 64 is not sitting still. Even a simple die shrink may allow AMD to put out 3.4-3.6GHz parts, which would be quite competitive with what we're currently seeing from Conroe.
I would certainly hope that Conroe has a performance advantage over AMD64, though. No desktop or server part that Intel has put out in the last two years has been competitive from a performance standpoint with Athlon 64. The dual-core Xeon parts are a joke (and everyone in the industry knows it), the Pentium D gobbles down power and can't match Athlon 64's performance at half the wattage, and even Intel's low-end Celeron D is killed by the cheaper Sempron.
It's only rarely about performance anymore. Most PCs sold do absolutely nothing 95% of the time. It's about power usage, availability, the strength of the chipsets and the price of the chipset and CPU.
AMD chipsets are cheaper than Intel chipsets. Semprons are cheaper than Celeron Ds. Unless that changes, AMD is going to continue to destroy Intel's marketshare in the low-end and mid-range PC business. Only Dell is keeping Intel alive in the low-end market now.
Take a look in any retail store. You see more AMD than Intel. That has never been the case before - AMD has never had this kind of shelf space. They've never had this much fab capacity. They've never had this much acceptance in the corporate world.
That alone should have Intel very, very worried.