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AMD Takes 25 Percent of Server Market 164

Posted by Zonk from the isn't-that-a-d dept.
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."
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AMD Takes 25 Percent of Server Market More

AMD Takes 25 Percent of Server Market

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  • The Intel monopoly? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by krell ( 896769 )
    Does anyone talk about the Intel monopoly anymore? Or has the problem solved itself?
    • It's not a monopoly when their chief competitor has over a fifth of the market (and gaining)

      • Re:The Intel monopoly? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FlyByPC ( 841016 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @10:29AM (#15824729) Homepage
        More importantly, it's not a monopoly when another company (AMD, Intel, etc) can build a compatible processor that can do essentially the same tasks. Everyone agrees that AMD and Intel chips can both run workstations and desktops.

        This is why I see Windows as a monopoly -- in order to be certain of being able to run all of the Windows applications out there, you need to have Windows, not Wine or MacOS etc.

        Competition is a good thing. I've traditionally run AMD chips in my machines, since I've had good results and gotten good value, but I wish Intel well, too -- if only to keep AMD honest.
        • 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 Int

          • Re:The Intel monopoly? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            But writing software that is portable between AMD and Intel "x86" is easy. Writing stuff that is portable between PPC and x86 is hard. That is why AMD/Intel x86 can be counted in the same market but PPC/x86 can't.

            In the same way, writing code portable between Windows and Linux is hard, so Linux isn't in the same market as Windows (unless it is a java app, or web-based).
        • 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" ;-)
          • Some time after you've been good all day we'll break out a SPARC module and show you why chips are small. Perhaps if you have lots of time we can go to the crypographic museum "bricks", "boulders", and "tiles" up close. I believe chip just refers to the actual silicon component, the entire item you plug in is a package. Dunno about the latest ones, but last time I looked they were smaller than my thumbnail which counts as a chip in my book.

  • Mega hurts! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by andrewman327 ( 635952 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @10:20AM (#15824665) Homepage Journal
    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! (Score:3, Informative)

      by masklinn ( 823351 )
      They've turned away from it since the Prescott deep-frier fiasco, it's "just" that they didn't have any chip available and had to get back to the drawing board to build new chips (the Core2) from the Pentium-M and P-III architectures.

    • Re:Mega hurts! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @12:15PM (#15825428) Homepage

      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.

      • AMD has announced plans to go to quad-core by sometime next year, and there is a process shrink coming up towards the end of this year. Even without a new core, AMD has some tricks coming. A lot of the intel improvement is due to a change in process.

        • Re:Mega hurts! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sofar ( 317980 )
          how do you call a complete redesign "change in process" ?

          Right now AMD is changing nothing more than sizes and process. In the past year it was Intel who worked on a major stepping in CPU design. On top of that Intel is releasing kentsfield (quadcore) at the end of *this* year, not *next*

          I'm not an intel fanboy but I'm certainly not an AMD-zealot. Things change in the CPU industry and AMD is not interested in becoming the fastest cpu maker anymore. The purchase of ATI proves that ATI is planning to become a
      • If anything it's a testament to branding, contracts, and inertia that Intel was able to keep 75% of the market with an inferior product that was more expensive most of the time.

      • Re:Mega hurts! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by WuphonsReach ( 684551 )
        (I think you mean "no contest" not "no content".)

        Anyway, on the AMD side they should gain some of it back when they shrink from 90nm down to 65nm in the 4th quarter of 2006. I think that gets them some automatic power savings due to the process shrink and possibly a performance boost (higher frequencies?).

        But the Intel Core 2 Duo chips are looking like very good chips which definitely catch up with AMDs offerings and even surpass it in some (all?) areas. Their pricing is also rather aggressive for bei
        • It's a very good time to build / buy systems.

          Hmm, well I'm glad that's true but for someone like me who's looking to replace his motherboard/CPU and isn't an expert in the CPU market, it's pretty difficult. I'm not sure whether to go with AMD, Intel, or wait. Isn't 'buy now' and 'wait' always the dilemma, given that there are always constant improvements in CPUs and 5 minutes after you've purchased some smartass will say "haha, your chip is slow as ..."?
          • It has truly gotten difficult lately. My old motto when I did build/buy/sell/repair boxen full time was always "Build AMD, buy intel" there seems to still be something to that, if your solution is better found in name brand get an Intel, if you can really build the box you want with the price you want get an AMD chip. Buy the chip that is two price points down from whatever the premium CPU at this time is and you'll get 85% of the performance at 50% of the price.
          • The magic word for you is "motherboard bundles" at places like MWave. They tell you what CPU goes with what motherboard and give you a list of RAM configs. They'll even put it together and test it for $9.

            Hardest part is then figuring out what motherboard to use.

            (And I don't care what the smartass's have to say. I buy wherever the "knee" of the price/performance curve is. Usually whatever was "hot" 12 months ago now sells for a good price.)

  • AMD's advantage is being first-to-market (Score:4, Informative)

    by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @10:21AM (#15824675) Journal
    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.
    • I think the acceptance of AMD64 was inevitable once companies like IBM started offering AMD servers. But IBM long term didn't have much of a choice either. In corner A you can get a whitebox that is significantly faster, uses much less power, and utilizes 64bit technology. In the other corner you have the expensive inefficiant intel. With more and more people clamoring that they want AMD it was just a matter of seizing an opportunity, or letting your sale slide to someone else. When even the hand of De
      • 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 fo

    • It will be curious to see what the Core 2 Duo proc (and related intel procs) does. According to reviews I've read (and Maximum PC who's 2006 dream machine contains a Core 2 Duo), the processor is amazing. Under full tilt, it doesn't overheat even with passive cooling, which is a major departure from my Pentium 4 - watercooled to keep the noise down.

      ~X
      • 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 shif
    • Intel had a true, high-performance, 64-bit product out years ahead of AMD, and all you people out in Desktop-land went "EWWWWWW!!!". "it's too hot, too expensive, too hard to code, and it won't run Quake e^(pi)!". Intel's fault was believing the old IBM saying, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future". Instead, AMD took what they already knew how to do (improve IA-32), bolted some reasonably-well thought out 64-bit extensions onto it, and sold it as a future-proof
      • Intel had a true, high-performance, 64-bit product out years ahead of AMD, and all you people out in Desktop-land went "EWWWWWW!!!". "it's too hot, too expensive, too hard to code, and it won't run Quake e^(pi)!". Intel's fault was believing the old IBM saying, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future".

        high performance? Only in floating point math. FP is a big important part of our world these days, it's used even in audio processing, all our games are all FP... But the Athlon's performance is superior in every other category, and it was about a tenth the price or less for the processor alone. The price of a complete solution...

        iTanic has gotten precisely the treatment it deserves.

      • Intel had a true, high-performance, 64-bit product out years ahead of AMD, and all you people out in Desktop-land went "EWWWWWW!!!".

        Curious that you don't mention the Itanium by name... It may have its niche, but expecting the PC market to drop everything and adopt the 'Itanic was pure folly. AMD's solution may have been conservative, but by maintaining backwards compatibility with no performance penalty (often the opposite) there wasn't a good reason _not_ to buy and AMD64 processor. Yes, the x86 ar

  • Intel Conroe (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Cpoff ( 991199 )
    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?
    • Conroe isn't the server chip... the Xeon 5100 series is the Core 2 based server chip.

      • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:3, Informative)

        by jfinke ( 68409 )

        Which I believe are the Woodcrests.

        Woodcrests - Server.

        Conroe - Desktop.

        Merom - Portables.

      • AKA Woodcrest IIRC
    • Yes, Intel will with certainty take back some market share in the 2P and 1P (4 core and 2 core, respectively) market with Woodcrest. Their performance benefit will degrade somewhat in 4P servers since they're still using a FSB design, but overall that's a fairly small part of the market. To be competitive there they'll need to move to their next gen interconnect, CSI.

      • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:5, Informative)

        by twiddlingbits ( 707452 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:11AM (#15824979)
        Based on the opinion of most IT analysts, the 4P servers is actually the "sweet spot" of the market. So I expect Opteron to continue it's lead there. The HyperTransport from AMD is superior to the FSB when you start getting into multiprocessor servers. And I expect AMD will extend HT to be up to 8 chips (currently 4) in the next generation chips sometime in 2007.
        • Its already 8, assuming you buy an 800-series chip. For opeterons, the two different factors you pay for are price and number of HT links. 8-way has been available from the beginning with this architecture.
          • Last I spoke with AMD (which was about 6 weeks ago, and I work for an AMD server vendor) the 8 way HT interconnect Opteron chips will require Socket F. In those chips each Opteron can connect to 7 others, I'm NOT talking about 4 - Dual Core Opterons which is an 8 way server, we have those already. Socket F is complete, in the bag but for some reason AMD has yet to give the offical go ahead for us to take orders. Given the way AMD is going you by 2008 you will get a 64way server with 8-8 core CPUs all inte

    • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MrFlibbs ( 945469 )
      As others have pointed out, the project name for the server market is "Woodcrest", not "Conroe". To answer your question, though, it most definitely will have an impact on AMD's market share -- a negative one for AMD. However, AMD's hypertransport does scale better than Intel's frontside bus architecture. This means DP systems (dual processor sockets) will perform better with Intel but that MP (multiple processor sockets; usually 4) may be a different story. I've not seen any published benchmarks, but A

      • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:2, Informative)

        by Kuad ( 529006 )
        Except that there is no Conroe-based chip (Woodcrest or other) for >2 socket systems until next year. Woodcrest is 1-2P (2-4 core) only.

    • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:17AM (#15825020)
      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.

      • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:3, Informative)

        by shawnce ( 146129 )
        Core = Core Solo and Core Duo (aka Yonah, a laptop chip)

        Core 2 = the foundation of Intel's next generation CPU which are as follows...
            Merom - laptop chip - T55xx, T56xx and T7xxx
            Conroe - desktop chip - E6xxx, X6800, X6900, etc. - (Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, etc.)
            Woodcrest - server chip - Xeon 51xx

      • Re:Intel Conroe (Score:5, Informative)

        by CTachyon ( 412849 ) <chronos AT chronos-tachyon DOT net> on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @02:15PM (#15826472) Homepage

        (BTW, EM64T = shameless clone/re-branding of x86-64, which is an open standard created by AMD. A rare case of Intel not succumbing to Not Invented Here syndrome. From here on, I'll lump them both under the name "AMD64".)

        FWIW, I have very little hands-on experience (not being a frequent programmer of x86 assembly), but there are two big features of AMD64 that stand out: more registers (which helps compilers especially), and addressing relative to %rip (the 64-bit Instruction Pointer). The former lets you compute more things on-the-fly without reserving stack space for temporary variables, which can cut down on round trips to L2 or main memory -- thus making AMD64 a bit more like a RISC system, while leaving behind the ivory tower "orthogonal" (read: code-bloating) instruction sets that RISC forces on you. The latter lets your code reference constant things like strings (which are generally compiled into the .text section, right alongside the code that uses them) without [PIC] reserving a register for it, or [non-PIC] hardcoding the address. This simplifies the build process for a LOT for programmers.

        Quick tutorial on PIC:

        Let's say I have a function, void hello() { printf("Hello, World!\n"); }. If I compile and link this code normally, I get something that looks like push $0x80484b8; call printf, where 0x80484b8 is a hard-coded address located in the .text section (or else a section for data constants that can be found relative to .text). If you're building an executable, that's fine, since the location of .text will be known at link-time.

        However, if you want to bundle your code into a shared library, that won't do at all. Each program that loads your library will load it at a different address, so .text could be anywhere in memory. On a modern system, you can add a fixup so that the dynamic linker patches your code on the fly, but now your "shared" library has one copy in memory per instance, even if it's all instances of the same program. That's worse than a static library! The solution is called PIC, Position Independent Code, and is invoked with -fPIC when using GCC. On x86, it usually looks something like this: call .Lfixup; .Lfixup: pop %ebx. Since x86 provides relative jump/call instructions, you can call to .Lfixup without knowing the absolute address, which pushes %eip on the stack as the return address. After the pop, %ebx now contains the absolute address of the .Lfixup label at runtime, and you can safely access your constants relative to that. (All that fuss just because you can't use %eip directly.)

        On the downside, you've now eaten a register (on the already register-starved x86 architecture) and you've blown away most branch predictors, forcing a pipeline stall. Not a biggie if you just do it once in main() or similar, but since this might be a library function, you have to do it each time the function is called, in each function that needs it. Ew. It works, but it's not elegant, and it eats performance very badly if you call a PIC function from within an inner loop, so a lot of programmers just tell their tools to compile the entire program twice: once with PIC, and again without. (That's what all those *.lo files are from GNU libtool.)

        AMD64 allows compilers (and assembly writers) to unify PIC and non-PIC code into a single, efficient path. Instead of jumping through hoops to copy %rip to %rbx and locate your constants relative to %rbx, you can just address your constants relative to %rip directly. There's no longer any penalty for using PIC, so compilers can just turn it on by default, saving the world from millions of tiny hassles that add up to one big Ick. It's probably the single most real-world useful thing they could have possibly added to the x86 instruction set.

  • Competition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @10:32AM (#15824749) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Hi everyone.
    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/article2/0,1697,1989036 ,00.asp [extremetech.com]

    I think i might be upgrading to these w
    • 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.

      • Re:Not so so Fast, Intel may be getting it all bac (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @10:58AM (#15824897) Journal
        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.
        • 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.

        • Yeah, all those Cray's don't scale well at all (Score:4, Informative)

          by charnov ( 183495 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @12:48PM (#15825688) Homepage Journal
          Yeah Cray [cray.com] 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.

    • Re:Not so so Fast, Intel may be getting it all bac (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Peter La Casse ( 3992 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:03AM (#15824928)
      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)

      I do not think that means what you seem to think it means.

    • Re:Not so so Fast, Intel may be getting it all bac (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ocbwilg ( 259828 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:23AM (#15825063)
      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.
      • 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.)
        • 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 ne
    • 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.

  • Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:02AM (#15824919)
    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?
    • 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.
    • Apple has shiney candy-like graphics and cases. AMD's graphics and cases suck.

  • Via C3? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:06AM (#15824950)
    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.
    • Well the C3 is ok when you need very low power draw/heat production and you don't care that much about performances.
    • They're ideal for low-CPU network services such as DNS / DHCP. Pair of laptop drives or flash memory and you have a box that is very low-power and low-maintenance.

      Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize a use for my old 600MHz C3. My current plans are to do the DHCP / DNS with it so that I can shut other boxes off when they aren't needed.
    • People are running servers with Via C3 processors?
      just because a box's primary job is providing a service over a network (rather than supporting a local user) doesn't nessacerally mean it needs to be fast.

  • Standard business cycles in CPU industry. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:10AM (#15824970)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jhfry ( 829244 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:14AM (#15824998)
    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.
    • 1) Why do you believe AMD can do something Intel cannot?
      2) If AMD does not match Intel, they will be forced to create coprocessors to supplement the CPU because Intel currently has the faster CPU
      3) The time it takes AMD to match Intel gives Intel the same amount of time to stay ahead. The real question: If AMD were really ahead of Intel, why didn't AMD create an Opteron/Athlon killer in the time it took Intel to create their C2D?
      4) Intel's shortcoming was sticking to Netburst two years too long. AMD's advan
      • Those are great questions - and I think one of the largest answers in that AMD has not started using 65nm production on a large scale, which is probably keeping clock speeds lower than that what they could be producing. Make no mistake, if AMD wanted to put out 3.2 ghz chip right now to compete with Intels, they could. However, Intel doesn't need to increase their clock speeds to 3.2 or higher yet, so AMD is now getting beat clock to clock. Intel has a new memory controller trick which allows it to do mo
        • As soon as AMD gets to 65nm, Intel is moving to 45nm. Intel can already clock past 3.5GHz, 4GHz with some serious tweaking, today. Intel has lots of headroom with 65nm, and loads more with 45nm.

          In other words, as soon as AMD releases a faster CPU, so can Intel.

          The question holds, what can AMD pull out of their hat to BEAT Intel?

      • 1) Why do you believe AMD can do something Intel cannot?

        Umm, because AMD has the better architecture, and Intel isn't going to just throw theirs out overnight.

        [...] because Intel currently has the faster CPU

        The only comparisons I've seen have been for 32-bit software. When it comes to 64-bit, Intel is lagging behind. And still there, they're only winning on the float. In a few months you can expect AMD to leapfrog Intel, and then Intel to leapfrog AMD again, etc. If AMD can just continue to maintain pa

    • 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.

      I can imagine it with a $100 PCI hardware crypto card as well...

  • Stock Price (Score:3, Informative)

    by KylePetty ( 990568 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:20AM (#15825038)
    Perhaps the submitter would like ignore the fact that AMD's stock price has also taken a beating.

  • Bang for the buck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BCW2 ( 168187 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:23AM (#15825060) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Bang for the buck (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shawnce ( 146129 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @12:25PM (#15825498) Homepage
      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 [intel.com] Xeon 5100 series starts at $209 (@1.6GHz) and tops out at $851 (@3GHz) while AMD's [amd.com] dual core Opteron series starts at $316 (Model 265) and tops out at $1051 (Model 285).
    • Intel's prices are aggressive for being a brand new chip. Very competitive with AMDs offerings. And in the server market, CPU cost is usually only about 10-15% of the total cost (it's the disk drives that eat up a large portion of the hardware budget). Most of the time when we're spec'ing machines, we try to get the most cores for the least money so that we can spend more on RAM.

      On the desktops, the new Intel dual-core CPUs are still a bit expensive ($200-$250). But it forced AMD to drop their X2 price

  • Well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by paul248 ( 536459 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:33AM (#15825144) Homepage
    Could they please give it back? I'm trying to browse the Internet here.

  • Illustrates the inefficiency of the market (Score:5, Interesting)

    by njdj ( 458173 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:54AM (#15825292)

    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.

    • Never the less, it is good news for consumers. When competition thrives good things happen - advancements in technology and drops in price.
    • Your statement assumes that price/performance is the only factor involved in picking AMD vs Intel. You forget about reliability, availability of other components (specifically just the right motherboard), future upgradeability, and specific strength (perhaps your software relies heavily on a specific operation or set of operations where Intel's SIMD implementation is better). To assume these factors account for nothing is naive.
      • Those are minor factors affecting market share, yes, but the real issue is AMD's production capacity. AMD just doesn't have the fabs at present to supply 90% of the market. Large vendors know this, and they also bitterly remember having made large orders with AMD in the past that they weren't able to deliver. And even if AMD was able to ramp up production, vendors' existing contracts with Intel can't be broken overnight.
        • AMD just doesn't have the fabs at present to supply 90% of the market.

          They are continually building fabs, they have contracts with 3rd parties to supply cores if they can't meet demand, and are now taking on ATI as well.

          Intel is the one that has had recent supply problems. Their serious chipset shortages at the end of 2005 seriously raised prices, and forced many companies to go elsewhere.

    • Re:Illustrates the inefficiency of the market (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not only do you neglect other performance and pricing factors, but you completely neglect that AMD has not been on top for a complete server replacement cycle yet. Companies of any size retire old servers and buy new ones on a schedule. So even if you sold 100% of the servers in a given year, you might gain between 16% and 33% total marketshare (depending on the replacement schedule) in that same period of time.

  • NYLF (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pancake Bandit ( 987571 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @11:59AM (#15825327)
    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.
    • Although a good question, I bet he'd say the same thing now, considering Intel has 75% of the server market. AMD is catching up, and good for them, but they're not Intel yet, which is a good thing.

  • amd edge endure w servers more than desktop (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 2ms ( 232331 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @12:05PM (#15825355)
    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.

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