Slashdot Mirror
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."
More importantly, it's not a monopoly when another company (AMD, Intel, etc) can build a compatible processor that can do essentially the same tasks. Everyone agrees that AMD and Intel chips can both run workstations and desktops.
This is why I see Windows as a monopoly -- in order to be certain of being able to run all of the Windows applications out there, you need to have Windows, not Wine or MacOS etc.
Competition is a good thing. I've traditionally run AMD chips in my machines, since I've had good results and gotten good value, but I wish Intel well, too -- if only to keep AMD honest.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
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.