Intel Loses Market Share to AMD

diverge_s wrote to mention an article examining Intel's market share loss to AMD in the fourth quarter of 2005. From the article: "Sales of Intel-based desktop PCs fell 22.3 percent during the fourth quarter, according to Current Analysis. As a result, sales of AMD-based desktops took the lead during the pivotal fourth-quarter holiday shopping season. AMD chips were found in 52.5 percent of desktop PCs sold in U.S. retail stores during that period."

Consumer vs Corporate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, it's always been my understanding that Intel is dominant in corporate computing, where no small number of third party corporate applications are only "certified" to work on Intel processors and the use of AMD processors endangers your ability to take advantage of your pricy support contract.

Re:Point of interest

[jhutch2000]

You aren't looking at comparable chips, then. At similar performance marks, the AMD chips are cheaper than their Intel counterparts.

Re:Is AMD profitable?

[beavis88]

Barely, but yes -

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=amd [yahoo.com]

Re:Marketing misstep?

[Sique]

It was a 'misstep' they had to take with going away from the Netburst architecture anyway. The Pentium M and successors all have much lower clock rates with still retaining comparable performance. For low power devices the high clock rates were hell.

Cache...

[brunes69]

Yeah but a Sempron 2200+ will stomp all over a 2.2 Celeron. It has way more cache ( 128k/256k in the Sempron vs 8k/128K L2 in the Celeron) and also a generally better pipeline. You can't judge a CPU on MHZ alone.

Re:Point of interest

[GmAz]

I used to work at CompUSA and was in charge of the desktop department so I saw every new machine come in and personally set up the demos and the price tags. I saw numerous HP, Gateway, Compaq and Emachine models come out with AMD64 processors around 3000+ to 3700+. The basically identical Intel model always cost at least $250 more. And since we, the salesman, had pretty much free reign as long as we sold computers put whatever we wanted on the computers. I loved doing benchmarks and the AMD always came out ahead. Only a couple times did intel beat out AMD and it was usually the new Prescott cores, though not new anymore, until AMD came out with their new cores. I don't consider myself a fanboy of one particular manufacturer, I am a fanboy of cost vs. performance. For the past four years, AMD has won me over.

RETAIL sales..

[sadr]

Note that this only applies to retail sales.

It does not include total sales, where AMDs market share is significantly lower. e.g. this report excludes Dell entirely. Overall, they're somewhere around 25% of total shipments.

AMD is taking marketshare away from Intel, but they are still a much smaller player.

Re:Is AMD profitable?

[Stalyn]

"For the three months ended Dec. 25, AMD earned $95.6 million, or 21 cents per share, on sales of $1.84 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2004, it lost $30 million, or 8 cents per share, on sales of $1.26 billion."

"For all of 2005, AMD earned $165.5 million, or 40 cents per share, on sales of $5.85 billion. That compares with a 2004 profit of $91.2 million, 25 cents per share, on sales of $5 billion."

So AMD earned more money in the recent 4th quarter than all of 2004. And a 125.6 million increase for 4th quarter earnings from last year. No wonder AMD stocks are up so much today.

Re:El cheapo?

[jandrese]

Yeah, the original AMD chips were generally thought of as "not quite as good as Cyrix". Anybody who cared one whiff about quality back then went Intel. It wasn't until the K6 line that AMD started to really position themselves as a quality chipmaker, and it wasn't really until the Athlon line that they pulled themselves out of the pit of the Computer-Show Beige Box hawked by some greasy fat guy crowd.

Re:Intel plays it smart.

[Guysmiley777]

Umm, where did you get your numbers? Intel's market cap is $136.56B and AMD's is $15.06B. Intel is a mammoth company, but the issue here is their current product line is measurably weaker than AMD's.

With regards to competition - I want to build a PC. I can build an Intel based box or an AMD based box. How is that not competition? Do you think consumers think "Wellll, the AMD CPU is faster, cooler and cheaper, but boy their market cap just isn't impressive enough."?

Re:Godd quality and low prices work :)

[paitre]

3. Intel = server CPU. This is a very high margin area that AMD continues to fail to penetrate

If you are referring strictly to the high-volume, sub-$25k/machine market, you're only kinda (barely) right.
If you are referring to any other segment of the server market that Intel and AMD both play in (ie. 4-way, and >$25k), you're wrong. Dell sold a whopping -4- machines that cost greater than $25k last quarter. -4-. Clusters are accounted for as lots of little machines, and while Intel has greater share there due to volume, AMD's presence in the cluster market is anything but insignificant. Saying that AMD is failling to penetrate the server market would have been true two years ago. It's not been true for a while, now (cf. Q32004 AMD's share in servers was 8% - for a company that effectively had -0- prior to Opteron, that's significant).

AMD's current share of the overall x86 server market is some 16% now. Calling 16% insignificant is a stretch, at best. This is particularly true in light of the near -40%- share that AMD has in the 4-way market. Of course, that's Q3's numbers. Not Q4's (which were announced yesterday - .40/share before the one-time Spansion spin-off charge).
Judging by Intel's -miss- of their market estimates, and AMD's blowing theres away, I'd say that their server numbers are up, yet again.

Re:Cache...

[freidog]

Actualy the socket A Semrpon's are nothing special. They're stripped down versions of the old AthlonXPs with a new system that rates them against Celerons (So AMD can put bigger numbers on slower chips).
Now, the first Netburst based Celerons, the 400mhz FSB / 128KiB L2 parts, are some of the worst chips intel produced since the cacheless Celeron 300s...

A more appropriate comparison of budget chips today would be the S754 Sempron 2500+ - 3100+ against the Celeron D 2.53 - 3.06. They stack up fairly comperabely in overall performance (Sempron wins for games, Celeron wins for multimedia), and prices are almost identical 63-80 for AMD, 66-80 for Intel.

AMD still has the price advantage against many P4s, but in the budget world it's a much closer race.

Re:How's the laptop market doing?

[wx327]

Centrino is the chipset used in those notebooks.

Close...

From Intel:

The technology represented by the Intel Centrino mobile technology brand combines the Intel® Pentium® M processor, the Intel® 855 Chipset Family and the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection. All components were optimized, validated and tested to work together with mobility in mind.

Re:Point of interest

[Sebastopol]

When you match that with their server options AMD are wiping the floor with Intel at almost every level.

Retail Desktop - Intel
Server - Intel

Corporate Desktop - Intel
Mobile - Intel

AMD is making headway in retail and server (intel has squat on their roadmap).

However, AMD is making much less on the segments they are competing in. Server is high ASP, but very low volume. Retail desktop is high volume, and razor thin ASP.

AMD needs to focus on being competitive in price to dominate corporate desktop (Intel's fab capacity means they can easily underprice AMD in this arena). Everyone keeps quoting the CPU price for a boxed part, but that is the HIGHEST POSSIBLE PRICE Intel will charge for a CPU. It can be 50-60-70% cheaper per CPU for high volume corporate sales. AMD is fukked in this area because in 30 years, they have still failed to even come close to Intel's volume. AMD hasn't had enough R&D dollars to compete here, but that can change.

And AMD also needs a competitive part in mobile, where the volume is growing every year and ASPs are sky high. This is where Intel is focusing. AMD is years behind Intel in mobile power-miserly processors.

So it is shaping up to be an interesting battle. Lets see if AMD can hang on to their lead this time.

AMD just kicks Intel's butt, period

[neamerjell]

AMD has been kicking Intel's butt for a long time, mostly because of their price for performance ratio. Intel's pricing has always been higher per performance unit (however you wish to measure it) than AMD. AMD has always been finding ways to boost performance and efficiency in order to stay ahead of Intel: Back when Athlon's first came out, their numbers were to signify that their processor were equivalent to an Intel of a certain speed (The Athlon 1800+ could keep up with an Intel 1.8GHz, but only ran at 1.53GHz) because of their architecture redesign.

This is not news! Its just NORMAL!

[I.M.O.G.]

This article from MAY OF 2005, shows why this is just spin - anyone who has been paying attention to AMD in the retail outlet sector should know that AMD has done well in this area [overclockers.com] for quite some time! The exact figure from last May was... You guessed it... 52%!

Because of the mobile chips

[nacs]

I think one of the biggest reasons is because AMD's laptop processor lineup sucks hard and Apple really needed to deliver with their new Powerbooks / "Macbook".

I'm sure Intel's DRM technology and production capability also played a factor.