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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."
It seems that as soon as Intel turned away from its old "our chips have a higher clock speed" marketing tactic, they lost market share. Now people are comparing chips based on speed, heat, cost, etc. instead of the number on the box. With the current battle between AMD and Intel at fever pitch, I expect to see even more innovation that usual from their incredible R&D departments.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Does anyone see the Conroe core making a difference at all? When it comes to server applications, does AMD's
technology (HyperTransport etc) make it that much more desirable? Or will/should Conroe gain more market share back to Intel?
This proves an upstart can influence a market and take away from a huge company.
It helped that Intel stumbled when they released their Prescott Pentium chip which couldn't match the price, performance, and power-efficiency of the AMD Athlon 64 single and dual processor chips.
You're on slightly shaky ground there. Writing cross-platform software is relatively easy, and so it is a choice that people other than Microsoft have made to write platform-dependednt software. There are differences between Intel and AMD's x86 instruction sets and, while they share a large common subset, it is possible to write software that runs on one but not the other. The fact that most software runs on Windows on any x86 CPU is an artefact of the marketplace (and that's IBM's fault; they forced Intel to license their designs to AMD as a condition of buying a load of 8088s, but regarded operating systems as interchangeable so they didn't make the same requirement to Microsoft).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Via Technologies is the third player in the mix with 5.5 percent share during the second quarter of 2006, but that figure was inflated due to end-of-life shipments of the company's C3 processor and will likely fall over the rest of the year, McCarron said.
People are running servers with Via C3 processors?
My desktop machine is powered by a C3/866 but it is a cheap low power (in all senses) processor. If the C3 even makes it onto the radar then it sounds like the statistics are by volume rather than by price. It is a pity that AMD have also stopped producing their Geode, that was aimed at the same markets.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Expect Intel to take share back in the 2P and below market (largest market) while AMD will hold onto their lead in the 4P market until at least early next year, and possibly a while longer due to the technical superiority of their HT-based interconnect. Conroe and Woodcrest are undeniably the better uarch's, but when you start scaling to more CPUs the interconnect becomes more and more important.
It's impressive, to say the least, than Intel has managed to make Conroe perform so well without an integrated memory controller. A lot of uninformed fanboys will claim they "cheated" by using so much cache, but there's no cheating in the microprocessor field and even the 2M Allendale units with less cache have stellar performance. I can't wait for them to come out with their next gen chips with CSI and an integrated memory controller, those will be stunning perforers in all sectors.
Though Intel currently has the single chip speed title, where they lag is in interconnectivity between processors. I believe that if AMD continues down their current path, they will dominiate the server market.
There is no doubt that AMD's solution for connecting multiple cores and processors is superior to Intel's. And when we start to see coprocessors being popped into one CPU socket providing super-accelerated services such as encryption... the shift to AMD will accelerate. I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor. Sure Intel's system will be faster for general purpose activites, but when your talking paying $600 for a coprocessor, or several thousand for additional servers... well you get the idea.
I think that though Intel currently has a leg up, it's only a matter of time before AMD knocks their other leg out from under them.
Now I'm no fanboy, I'm anxiously waiting for the Core 2 Duo to become widely available before I build my next workstation. But I still believe that AMD is eventually going to become the king of server processors, if not the desktop.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
AMD has taken 25 percent of the server market for itself,
During the time period that this data refers to, AMD's products had a clear lead in price/performance. But they only got a quarter of the market, instead of >90%, which they would have got if purchasers had been knowledgeable and rational.
I was at the National Youth Leadership Forum for Technology about 3 years ago, a 2 week seminar in San Jose. 2000 other kids just as geeky as me, what a blast! Anyways, there were a lot of speakers who came there, one of whom was the CEO of Intel. After he'd given his presentation, he opened up to questions. One kid asked something to extent of, "What are you going to do now that AMD has a 64-bit processor?" The crowd 'ooo'ed at his guts for asking the question we were all dying to ask. The CEO laughed. "I wouldn't want to switch places with them," he answered complacently. I wonder what he'd say now, three years later.
The Conroe is apparently definately ahead in single-processor (dual-core included) systems with the new COnroe. However, there seems to be consensus that the Intel FSB becomes bottleneck with larger number of processors. This bottleneck will only become more of an issue as the platform ramped up in speed. AMD will continue to benefit from this for disadvantage for intel platform with servers as even blades these days have like four processors.
and the answer appears to be, at the moment, unknown. Woodcrest benchmarks with 2P systems aren't out yet. And therein lies the big question. So Intel manages to smoke sharing an L2 cache with an external memory controller. Great. What happens when there's 2 CPUs contending for that one resource? I predict scalablity issues, otherwise Intel would have gone out with bells on for this one.
I think Conroe's advantage is really only apparent in 1P solutions, and thus, to get the biggest mindshare/perception shift, that's what Intel's pushing.
Conroe is an impressive single chip solution, and I'm looking forward to AMD's counter.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Have you seen Intel's pricing for Core 2 based CPUs? They compare if not out compete AMD on price for performance.
Intel's Xeon 5100 series starts at $209 (@1.6GHz) and tops out at $851 (@3GHz) while AMD's dual core Opteron series starts at $316 (Model 265) and tops out at $1051 (Model 285).
For sysadmins, the big advantage of AMD64 was that there was little to no risk in choosing it. You lost no performance at running existing 32bit apps (maybe even a speed gain) and you were ready for the 64bit shift.
Which was unlike other attempts to move to 64bit which required compromises (running 32bit code in an emulation layer or taking a performance hit on 32bit code). Or that required that you recompile everything into 64bit mode in order to take advantage of the new architecture.
I've said it for 2 years now (longer?), AMD64's ability to run legacy software without a performance disadvantage is why the market embraced it. Or at least, why they didn't run away screaming from it.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Note that only the high-end CPUs have the 4MB of L2 cache. The mid-range and low-end Intel chips only have 2MB of L2.
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.
(And worried might be the wrong term. I'd like to see the two companies compete for the next 10-20 years rather then one or the other running away with the performance crown.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
My Turion 64 X2 (dual core) at 1.8 GHz and at 25 Watts begs to disagree. Although this HP and other laptops featuring it aren't very expensive, they definitely aren't low-margin low end. AMD is making good money on these chips.
Intel's strength with OEMs (notably including Apple!) is the polished Centrino package: chipset, WiFi, processor, it all just fits together and works well. Not that recent Nvidia and ATI offering's aren't good... and GMA950 truly deserves to die a quick death. [Why of why did NIH kick in so that Intel couldn't adopt the excellent PowerVR Series 5 design? A deferred tile-based renderer is damn near ideal for an integrated GPU, and by now PowerVR's drivers have become solid enough so that Intel would have had absolutely no problem polishing them up to snuff.)