Intel CPU Prices Stagnate As AMD Sales Decline 252
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."
AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk. AMD needs some high profile names to adopt AMD processors. I mean, they've always been kind of fringe players, but in this tablet/notebook/smartphone age, they've become more fringe than ever. They could easily turn it around with serious support from just one big player like Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Google, etc. But it doesn't seem to be happening. And every time AMD has tried to court a big name [zdnet.com] or even merge with one [benzinga.com], they seem to come up short.
Maybe they should try sending flowers.
Well, DUH. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ten years ago if your PC was more than 2 years old, new software wouldn't run. Now? I'm running five year old boxes that run everything fine... as long as they have enough memory.
The fact is, you no longer have to replace that PC and its CPU every other year.
Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:4, Interesting)
More like, AMD haven't been making enough of a difference for long enough to justify buying them over Intel.
Back in the 486/Pentium days I saved a LOT of money by buying AMD - I got better performance for less money, and virtually perfect compatibility.
Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
Sure, they get an "advantage" for a few months on their top-of-the-line gaming processors of a few percent, but by the time those chips are available in any pre-fab computer you might pick up in a shop, that difference means nothing at all and the price difference isn't worth straying.
Not to mention that since buying ATI (which was an absolute DOG for hardware compatibility and drivers), AMD seemed to have followed suit and there are problems reported with certain games and AMD processors / chipsets / ATI cards that aren't present in similar Intel / nVidia setups.
Honestly, it's nothing to do with people lacking upgrades. It's everything to do with there just being no compelling reason to go with one or the other, except that everyone's HEARD of Intel and they've been making x86 chips before AMD even existed.
Re:AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Interesting)
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.
AMD processors aren't as good as intel ones. At least not right now. They're worse performance, performance per watt etc. Apple is big enough they don't need to deal with the #2 anything. For the same reason McDonalds doesn't sell presidents choice or pepsi. Apple, for all of its many, many faults thinks a lot about the user experience, and frankly Intel CPU's produce a better experience right now than AMD parts.
AMD kinda sorta has the right idea on combined CPU-GPU packages. Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't, and 'eyefinity' while cool isn't a product most people can manage, and Intel CPU's are better performance if you want performance, or better performance per watt if you just want battery life, overall leaving AMD a rough place in the market. For Apple, who are married now to portable devices, and don't care so much about windows gaming API's AMD just isn't making a good enough product. When Intels previous generation (sandy bridge) parts are still wiping the floor with new AMD stuff it's just not a good move to commit your business to the losing team.
*I'm talking about Apple adopting AMD processors across an entire product line. Not individual home use. For whatever problem a particular person has AMD setups can certainly be competitive. But Apple has a brand and a certain user experience it wants, and for them adopting AMD processors is not a good plan.