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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?
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.
Strong Dual-Core AMD processor sales--particularly Opteron--demonstrates the acceptance of the AMD64 platform by enterprise customers. Likewise, the AMD Turion 64 processor has won more than 60 design awards and been a top seller in the thin mobile PC category. AMD is simply taking advantage of an Intel vulnerability in being late to market with a true high-performance 64-bit product.
Sigs cause cancer.
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?
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.
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Hi everyone.
6 ,00.asp
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.
anyway, heres another articles http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,198903
I think i might be upgrading to these when they come out in numbers
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Intels current Core 2 based server class offerings only support 2 socket systems while AMD can scale to 4+ socket system. So in the 4+ socket segement AMD is still the only option (IIRC Intel's Itanium as well).
Of course with that said a lot of data centers as deploying blade based systems with the norm being 2 socket blades... so I believe Intel is targeting the large aspect of the market.
You're either exaggerating, or don't know what an order of magnitude is.
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.
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.
For more information on AMD, see: wikipedia on AMD
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.
Perhaps the submitter would like ignore the fact that AMD's stock price has also taken a beating.
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.
Yeah was talking mostly in the context of x86 based system... get much above 4 socket systems and you run up against the POWER5, Itanium, PA-RISC (still a lot around), etc. in high socket count systems.
Why are they called "chips"? A chip, by any other definition, is something small. Today's processors should be reffered to as "bricks", "boulders", "tiles" ;-)
Could they please give it back? I'm trying to browse the Internet here.
Ever owned a cow? I mean, come on!
Where were you when the voynix came?
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.
I have yet to see a benchmark of a 2P Intel system. Until we do, I don't think Intel's getting anything "back". They've made a mark with Conroe, but I'm still going to buy an AMD system, mainly because it's significantly less, and appears to remain that way for the next 6 months at least. Second reason - much better and mature motherboards. I don't want to swap $200 MBs a few times, which usually occurs with the newest cutting edge tech that hasn't had a shakeout yet.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Yeah Cray can't seem to get them to scale at all.
Seriously though, Newisys and IBM have chipsets to do 32 Opterons, but why? That market doen't need it for the trouble it would be. Right now, you can do four way glue-less and eight way with little trouble. The next revision, in Decemeber - March-ish timeframe, K8L adds more interconnects, the ability to split HT connections to 8 bits to double connections, and 4 cores per die. This all adds up to 32 way glue-less for a total of 128 cores. The real reason why you don't see large scale single bus style Opterons, is that the combination of the current HyperTransport (ver. 1) and NUMA make for a very chatty bus, which causes performance issues related to scale. The point of HT is that it is routable and switchable by HT chips on the bus-lines, a la Cray. It's just hardly anybody does it.
They scale fine.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I know you were trying to be funny, but any machine sold at office min or worst buy can be included in a cluster :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For 2 processor, 4 core, systems AMD did not have a massive performance advantage over Intel's NetBurst Xeons. In spite of Intel's shared bus architechture, for some applications Intel was better then AMD. Even when an AMD system was faster, Intel systems were often considerably cheaper. Blame Dell. AMD's big gains were made in the 4 processor, 8 core, systems.
With the Core 2 server chips, Woodcrest, Intel is the clear winner in 2 and 4 core systems. However Woodcrest can only be used in 2 and 4 core systems. For 8 core, (4 socket/processor) systems Intel still uses the old (failed) NetBurst Xeons. While AMD will lose the 4 core battle, they will maintain their 8 (and 16) core market share. The upshot is that AMD's share of the server market will go down, but not as much as you expect.
Inconceivable!
Make America grate again!
TFA only talks about marketshare not sales. AMD may very well be outselling (or close to outselling) Intel, but many old servers out there are still running Pentium chips. Considering the number of servers out there, 25% marketshare is huge - and it indicates that purchasers are being knowledgable and rational.
I was at Frag '06 up here in Canada, and both Intel and nVidia talked about their latest / greatest stuff. The nVidia guy seemed to be very excited about the AMD / ATI merger. The feeling he tried to give us was, will Crossfire remain open? Or will it only work on AMD based systems in the future? On th reverse, considering how many AMD systems sold use the nForce chipset, AMD would be crazy to lock nVidia out. I'm not sure they'd do that, but it's possible.
I've owned 4 AMD systems... two were K6-2 350's rock solid and easily overclocked. A 700 that died within 7 months, and thanks to the chipsets sucking took a month to make work after buying it. I also run a 1.3, that because of heat (60+) I have to underclock to 1.1. Tried various traditional aircooling, but not much luck. On the reverse I've never had an Intel die on me. That's just my personal experience, and I am sure there's someone with an exact opposite experience as me.
It does mean what he think it means if he always thinks in base 2, like any self-respecting computer nerd does.
My weak understanding of chip dynamics is the fact that 65 nm processes will inherently consume less power than a 90 nm feature size, so how much of the performance gains with the new "Conroe" or Core 2 duo lines is due to this feature size. The question to ask is it a core architectural difference or a process gain. I remember studying something about this in VLSI design.
Chand
In is interesting to watch the hype and commentary around AMD and Apple.
I have been a share holder in both since 2001 (not a huge share holder, but a few hundred shares). Anyway, AMD & Apple announce financial results about the same time (maybe the same day) and I noticed that they could announce almost identical results on a per share basis. Yet Apple stock would soar on the news while AMD stock would drop like a rock.
Apple does do PR much better than AMD, but I have been a long term beleiver in AMD.
Think Deeply.
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?
Plus a monopoly requires control by a single (you know mono) entity. Linux is not controlled by a single entity. Thus not a monopoly.
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.
Go back and read your architecture books...
Intel is using faster memory (for now), however, they still have to deal with the MIO, which increases their latency.
Dynamic cache does not buy you a whole lot if your application cannot find the data that it needs in the cache. Adds to latency.
If you are doing random I/O in RAM, there is not a whole lot that your prediction logic can do to save you.
The benchmarks that I am seeing that show an advantage for Intel are all synthetic tests that rely heavily on cache. Intel knows that they are strong there. The advantage for AMD has ALWAYS been on the cache miss. Most server applications are really good about missing cache.
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