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AMD Takes 25 Percent of Server Market
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has taken 25 percent of the server market for itself, according to a News.com article. This gives them some 21 percent of the entire x86 market, and is an increase from only 16 percent in the second quarter of 2005." From the article: "AMD has been picking away at Intel's server market share for several years based on the superior performance and power consumption of its Opteron processor. But Intel fired back last month with a new Xeon processor based on its Core microarchitecture that appears to be outperforming current Opteron processors on several tasks. Intel is pinning its hopes of resurrecting its market share--and its stock price--on the new Core generation of processors."
Does anyone talk about the Intel monopoly anymore? Or has the problem solved itself?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Kudos to competition. So many people wrote off AMD from the start for trying to compete directly with Intel. This proves an upstart can influence a market and take away from a huge company. We don't see it often enough, but it does happen.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think the acceptance of AMD64 was inevitable once companies like IBM started offering AMD servers. But IBM long term didn't have much of a choice either. In corner A you can get a whitebox that is significantly faster, uses much less power, and utilizes 64bit technology. In the other corner you have the expensive inefficiant intel. With more and more people clamoring that they want AMD it was just a matter of seizing an opportunity, or letting your sale slide to someone else. When even the hand of Dell is forced to sell AMD you know there must be a decent market force there.
AMD scales very well up to 4 sockets, but not so well after that. When you start getting up to 8-way and above, there is a lot more competition. The likes of IBM, Sun and Fujitsu own that market. If you need 32 or more CPUs, then x86 is very likely not to be the way to go.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Posting anonymously because I have a feeling this would get me modded down... So the 'perfect storm' article for Apple cites a 4% gain of the total LAPTOP market share as a reason for apple's soon to come victory, but a 5% increase in the ENTIRE x86 market by AMD is heralded with doubt, etc. etc. and with thoughts that Intel is going to come back? Slightly one sided?
I do not think that means what you seem to think it means.
Yes, Intel will with certainty take back some market share in the 2P and 1P (4 core and 2 core, respectively) market with Woodcrest. Their performance benefit will degrade somewhat in 4P servers since they're still using a FSB design, but overall that's a fairly small part of the market. To be competitive there they'll need to move to their next gen interconnect, CSI.
As others have pointed out, the project name for the server market is "Woodcrest", not "Conroe". To answer your question, though, it most definitely will have an impact on AMD's market share -- a negative one for AMD. However, AMD's hypertransport does scale better than Intel's frontside bus architecture. This means DP systems (dual processor sockets) will perform better with Intel but that MP (multiple processor sockets; usually 4) may be a different story. I've not seen any published benchmarks, but AMD may still have a performance advantage in 4-way server systems (8 cores).
Bottom line: Woodcrest is a very attractive server solution. It will be faster in dual socket systems, will be at least competitive in 4-way systems, and consumes less power. This will definitely eat into the recent gains AMD has taken away from Pentium IV-based systems.
Until Intel competes on price, AMD will continue to take market share. Servers are considered business machines. Businesses are looking at "Bang for the buck" and Intel keeps their prices too high to win this one. Performance does not have to be identical, just similar (these are servers, not gamer machines), then any business will choose the less expensive one every time. There have not been any real reliability issues between the two for years so it just comes down to price/performance. When I see a 20% or more price difference for similar products I wonder if ego gets in the way of common sense.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I just read a review on Inetl new C2 chips and from the specs, it apparently is faster by almost an order of magnitude than anything AMD has (im not a intel fan boy as everthing i have right now runs AMD) Anyway, the most interesting thing about these C2 chisp is how much cooler they are at the same time. I've read on article that said they were able to run them fanless.
One, they are not an order of magnitude faster. I have seen some benchmarks on the Core 2 Duo CPUs versus Athlon X2 CPUs, and in a clock for clock comparison they Core 2 Duo were up to 20% faster in some integer operations. Floating point performance was almost equal, as was memory access. 20% is not an order of magnitude.
Two, we are talking about server CPUs, not desktop CPUs. That means that we need to be comparing Xeon CPUs with Opteron CPUs, not Core 2 and Athlon.
Three, the new Core 2 and Xeon CPUs may be faster one on one, clock for clock, than an Athlon X2 or Opteron, but they still have the same old problem that has haunted Intel CPUs since the birth of the Athlon 64: the FSB. Putting 4+ MB of cache onto the Xeon and Core 2 CPUs helps alleviate some of the FSB bottlenecks (for memory access), but they still can't touch the Hypertransport interconnect for performance. And where this really comes into play is in scalability. If you put two or four Intel CPUs into the same server, they share the FSB. If you put two or four Opteron CPUs into the same server, they each have a dedicated connection to the memory, etc. Opteron-based servers scale much much better than Xeon-based servers. This is especially important now that people are pushing virtualization more and more. Instead of buying 10 small servers to handle 10 different tasks, they're buying a single 4-way server and running 10 virtual servers on it to save money and make better use of the CPU and memory resources that they have.
AMD has a huge advantage in applications that miss cache, and require memory access with low latency. (i.e.: MANY server applications)
Intel has done little to address this.
Intel had a true, high-performance, 64-bit product out years ahead of AMD, and all you people out in Desktop-land went "EWWWWWW!!!". "it's too hot, too expensive, too hard to code, and it won't run Quake e^(pi)!". Intel's fault was believing the old IBM saying, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future". Instead, AMD took what they already knew how to do (improve IA-32), bolted some reasonably-well thought out 64-bit extensions onto it, and sold it as a future-proofed Xeon. Intel hemmed and hawed, eventually gave up and did the same in a manner compatible with AMD, and this is where we are now; stuck with the x86 until the Sun grows cold.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
high performance? Only in floating point math. FP is a big important part of our world these days, it's used even in audio processing, all our games are all FP... But the Athlon's performance is superior in every other category, and it was about a tenth the price or less for the processor alone. The price of a complete solution...
iTanic has gotten precisely the treatment it deserves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not only do you neglect other performance and pricing factors, but you completely neglect that AMD has not been on top for a complete server replacement cycle yet. Companies of any size retire old servers and buy new ones on a schedule. So even if you sold 100% of the servers in a given year, you might gain between 16% and 33% total marketshare (depending on the replacement schedule) in that same period of time.
(I think you mean "no contest" not "no content".)
Anyway, on the AMD side they should gain some of it back when they shrink from 90nm down to 65nm in the 4th quarter of 2006. I think that gets them some automatic power savings due to the process shrink and possibly a performance boost (higher frequencies?).
But the Intel Core 2 Duo chips are looking like very good chips which definitely catch up with AMDs offerings and even surpass it in some (all?) areas. Their pricing is also rather aggressive for being a dual-core CPU. Not quite cheap enough (even the Core Duo) to put into low-end desktops but definitely inexpensive enough to put into mid-range desktops for more demanding users.
It's a very good time to build / buy systems. We're switching from putting Athlon64 3000+ CPUs to dual-core X2 3800+ CPUs now that the price cuts have hit. The extra cost is pretty small (+$60? +$80?) and we get snappier desktop systems that will last an extra few years. I'm hoping for another round of price cuts to drive prices down even lower (so we can outfit with 2GB instead of 1GB).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
At first, when I saw the 4MB numbers, I was worried because Opterons are 2x1MB L2. But once I dug into the real specs and saw that the majority of the Intel line is only 2MB L2 shared cache, I was less worried.
You're right about that. It's interesting that almost all of the early benchmarks were done with the 4MB cache models, whereas the benchmarks on the 2MB cache models didn't come until later (if at all). The same with retail availability. The only Conroe CPUs available now (outside of buying a new box from Dell) are the 4MB versions. The 2MB versions will supposedly come on August 7th. After seeing some of the benchmarks on the 2MB models, it becomes apparent just how important that 4MB of cache really is, as the 2MB versions don't deliver anywhere near the thrashing to AMD that the 4MB models do.