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Intel CPU Prices Stagnate As AMD Sales Decline
crookedvulture writes "Over the past few years, AMD's desktop processors have struggled to keep up with Intel's. AMD has slashed prices to make its chips more appealing, but Intel has largely held firm. Three years of historical data shows that Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena, and it's been great for Intel's gross margin. Unfortunately, it's not so good for consumers."
For 64 bit you have it the wrong way around - it's Intel who are AMD-compatible (that's why many operating systems still call the architecture amd64, since the x86-64 architecture was from AMD, and not from Intel - Intel being forced to follow AMD when their bet on Itanium failed). So if you want the genuine article for 64-bit, then you ought to be buying AMD.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Unfortunately, Apple might be about the last company that AMD has a decent shot with:
Like it or loath it, Apple adores thin-'n-light, caters to a less cost-sensitive customer segment, and has a fairly tightly polished ARM+hardware decode device strategy when it comes to HTPC type applications...
AMD has products that are quite cheap for the punch, but they tend to run a bit hot for the performance you get, and much of their virtue lies in comparatively strong IGPs, perfect for the light gaming and HTPC markets that Apple either doesn't much care about or would prefer you use an iOS device for.
AMD's features, particularly the comparatively strong GPU showing on even cheap parts(Intel has gotten better; but, because they don't have to care, they still tend to tie their best IGPs to their best CPUs, so you need to order some damn expensive CPU silicon to get the full punch, which still is fairly tepid, though not downright laughable, as historically), are an excellent fit in cost-sensitive laptops, all-in-ones, and desktops that aren't likely to get a discrete GPU upgrade. Unfortunately, those are niches that command serious volume; but not much in the way of margins.
Honestly, AMD might have much better luck cuddling up to Corporate IT. They don't, presently, have 'VPro'(but they could probably put a whole damn ARM SoC on their 'enterprise' motherboard reference model for half of what Intel charges for a CPU and chipset that doesn't have most or all of those management features lasered off, if the market demands it); but Team Corporate burns through generic good-enough beige boxes by the palletload, and pays somewhat better for them than does Joe Bestbuy. They'd have a hard time cracking CPU-intensive workstation applications; but the zillion desktop typenboxes, computationally unstressed servers that need huge slabs of RAM, and similar absolutely infest enterprise IT...
when their bet on Itanium failed.
But ... my HP rep tells me it is a fine architecture with a long future!
Another IT guy working at a nonprofit (we have over 100 staff) - we did get the Kill-A-Watt. Most of our machines are asleep when not in use via Faronics Powersave, which actually tracks the times when the computers are on and off on a server, and you can set policies, and if you input what you pay for power it will generate a report for you.
We also have machines that are around ten years old. We just replaced one last week that was from 1998. All staff here do are email and writing reports. Things that need more power (like accounting packages) have newer machines.
Last I checked we are saving over $1000 in power costs due to this power management software. We aren't going to replace 100+ machines to save $2 in power per machine per year. Governments might, as they can't seem to do math or ROI, but we won't. We'll let them live out their useful life.