Intel Admits To Falling Behind AMD 244
Vicegrip writes "CNN is carrying a Fortune story covering an analyst meeting held on Thursday. There, CEO Otellini admitted Intel has fallen behind AMD with lost market share, technological leadership, and recently profitability. Intel also announced cuts to 1 Billion in spending." From the article: "Intel's market share recently slipped below 80%, and Otellini strongly emphasized the need for market share gains in all his remarks. On the other hand, he also suggested that Intel's recent market share losses (to AMD, whose name was not mentioned) were in line with historical variations which tracked to Intel's product generations."
Turning Point for Intel? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like poorer people tend to avoid being seen as poor, while wealthy people almost always say they are poor.
Chipsets??? (Score:2, Interesting)
What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Around eighty % is still incredible, not least when you have a competitor like AMD. But I guess companies like Intel do what they can to instill fear in their employees to get them to work harder.
Further diversification of markets (Score:2, Interesting)
In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel's marketshare is deceiving because it is propped up on a number of "exclusive" contracts. Once those go away, and they will as AMD pulls away technologically and pricewise, Intel is going to see the market flipped in a very short amount of time.
Intel Outside, not just a good idea anymore.
Okay.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your lips keep moving, but I can't hear what you say. [anandtech.com]
Intel has such a long way to go at the highest end. They need to move away from their silly, old fashioned CPU <-> Northbridge <-> RAM architecture. I think it's telling that Otellini blamed "chipset" shortages for some of their market share loss, whatever the hell that really means. Intel is going to eventually have to sacrifice its chipset business to stay competitive. Nothing will change that. The memory controller has to be moved on-die. HyperTransport is here to stay and it will wipe the floor at the high end.
It's not just getting rid of NetBurst-- high IPC is great --but the more you have cores and sockets contending for memory access, the worse it will get for a shared FSB. Get your head out your butt Intel and fix the design.
Re:Chipsets??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Every new chip has a chance of requiring a new chipset but usually the chipsets are backwards compatible amongst a line of processors. For instance, a 945 chipset will run a 775-pin Prescott originally destined for a 915 chipset. If you got a 945, 955 or 975 you can essentially run every 775-pin processor Intel makes. If you bought a 915 you're SOL. [e.g. myself]
If they had a standard FSB (*cough* *cough* Hypertransport *cough*) they wouldn't have to tweak the damn thing with every new CPU.
Nothing is saying Intel has to copy AMD in that respect, it would be nice... if for example, you could plomp EITHER an AMD or Intel processor in a 940-pin [or the next series] of sockets. That would be REAL COMPETITION. As I understand it [I am likely wrong] the coherent bit of the HT link is mostly a logical concept. So Intel could use HT and invent their own damn coherent link.
To sum up: Diversity good, competition better, segregation bad.
Tom
Re:Both Intel and AMD May Fall (Score:3, Interesting)
Google is the 3rd or 4th largest server maker (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, just wow ! Did you guys see that in the article:
<<According to some industry experts, Google is now assembling so many of its own servers that it may be the third or fourth-largest server maker in the world.
>>
I think that a lot of companies could reduce their expenses by doing the same thing than Google: instead of buying expensive hardware, warranties and support from IBM/HP/Dell/Sun, they could hire people to design, build and maintain their own IT infrastructure. I think it makes sense for any shop with 1000+ machines. Think about it again:
To any non-believer: Google does exactly this, and it works very well for them. So why not starting to do it at your company ?
Re:Turning Point for Intel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:someone mentioned power (Score:3, Interesting)
The real question is, does AMD have anything up its sleeve to match Yonah (and they better have it soon), or will Intel regain its dominance?
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel has always had a process technology advantage over AMD. That never stopped AMD from shipping competitive products. Also, note that AMD's fab situation has gotten a lot better in the last year - with Fab 36 (and soon Chartered), AMD has the capacity to take on Intel in the market - something that they just couldn't do in the early Athlon days.
AMD has always been conservative in launching new processes, and it has benifited them in the past. Intel's 90nm process turned out to be the nail in the Prescott coffin, but AMD's 90nm launch resulted in CPUs that clocked much higher, used less power, and cost less money.
nothing on the horizion for 2 more years
K8L, for one. Dual-core Turions. 65nm in 1Q 2007. Quad-core in 2007.
two years worth of products that handily defeat anything from AMD
Ah, another Intel Conroe fanboy. While I'd agree that Conroe is looking quite good, note that Athlon 64 is not sitting still. Even a simple die shrink may allow AMD to put out 3.4-3.6GHz parts, which would be quite competitive with what we're currently seeing from Conroe.
I would certainly hope that Conroe has a performance advantage over AMD64, though. No desktop or server part that Intel has put out in the last two years has been competitive from a performance standpoint with Athlon 64. The dual-core Xeon parts are a joke (and everyone in the industry knows it), the Pentium D gobbles down power and can't match Athlon 64's performance at half the wattage, and even Intel's low-end Celeron D is killed by the cheaper Sempron.
It's only rarely about performance anymore. Most PCs sold do absolutely nothing 95% of the time. It's about power usage, availability, the strength of the chipsets and the price of the chipset and CPU.
AMD chipsets are cheaper than Intel chipsets. Semprons are cheaper than Celeron Ds. Unless that changes, AMD is going to continue to destroy Intel's marketshare in the low-end and mid-range PC business. Only Dell is keeping Intel alive in the low-end market now.
Take a look in any retail store. You see more AMD than Intel. That has never been the case before - AMD has never had this kind of shelf space. They've never had this much fab capacity. They've never had this much acceptance in the corporate world.
That alone should have Intel very, very worried.
Re:Why did Steve Jobs pick AMD? (Score:3, Interesting)
Until the Turion X2 ships, which won't be much longer. Going with the current single core Turions instead of the Core Duo would have made more sense since then OSX could have been 64-bit from the get-go. Now Apple will have to support both 32-bit and 64-bit codebases. Were Intel's cut-rate chips and other support worth it? Time will tell, but given that things like codecs get a *nice* boost from AMD64 (it's not just about breaking the 4GB barrier) I think Jobs screwed up.