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."

Comments

Mega hurts!

[andrewman327]

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.

Re:Mega hurts!

[MBCook]

Because their chips were terrible. Compare a P4 with an Athlon 64 and there is no content. The Athlon runs cooler, could usually beat the P4 in many contests despite the much lower clock, etc. The fact is that MHz was all Intel had going for it, technology wise. Once that started to slip up that was AMD's big chance. For the past few years most things I've seen have put AMD's Opterons much better than Intel's Xeons.

But, in the great spirit of competition, that will change. Intel's Core 2 Duo architecture looks to be a real winner. If the performance is anywhere near where the early numbers look, then AMD could be in real trouble. If AMD can't pull something out with the Opterons... They won't have a new architecture (K9 for the sake of argument) ready until late '08 early '09 at the earliest.

There is major competition again, this is good for consumers, and should be fun to watch too.

Standard business cycles in CPU industry.

[RightSaidFred99]

You have to hand it to AMD, they had quite a run and will continue to be successful, though not so wildly as before now that Intel has caught up with their NGMA.

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.

Intel's core has it's weaknesses

[jhfry]

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.

Re:Intel Conroe

[hackstraw]

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?

First, HyperTransport is an open standard, not an AMD technology, and from what I know, it kicks ass.

AMD has gained recently, especially in the server/HPC market because of a few things. Price, performance, power consumption, backwards compatibility, and 64bit offerings. These are the key variables for server/HPC computing. Power consumption and to some degree 64bit-ness are newer and these variables have increasing weights in today's markets.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the EM64T or other hacks for providing 64bit capabilities over a native 64bit architecture, but then again I've never dealt with these x86 extensions first hand, so I could change my opinion with new information. From what I know the original Intel Core was only 32bit, but the core duo included 64bit abilities.

Illustrates the inefficiency of the market

[njdj]

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.

NYLF

[Pancake Bandit]

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.

Re:Bang for the buck

[shawnce]

Until Intel competes on price, AMD will continue to take market share.

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).