back to article AMD grabs a quarter of x86 market with desktop gains, but server growth slows

AMD now accounts for 25 percent of all x86 processor shipments, but only made a slight increase in the past quarter against industry leader Intel in servers – the main gains came from the desktop market. Processor shipments in Q3 were up only modestly on a sequential basis, with growth well below what is expected for the …

  1. simpfeld

    Who's still wanting Intel chips?

    I don't know who is still buying these compared to AMD?

    You'd think 50% each would at least have happened by now.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

      My company for example. They only buy Intel, and nobody would risk their jobs by suggesting amd or forcing the issue. So we have less for more.

    2. Roj Blake Silver badge

      Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

      You'd be surprised how conservative some people are when it comes to technology purchases, and to paraphrase and old saying: nobody ever got sacked for buying Intel.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

        Most business are just buying Dell / Lenovo laptops

        Corporate IT have approved Dell / Lenovo, purchasing have approved that staff grade X can have a model Y

        It will run windows 11 and have 3 years of support

        Nobody cares who made the CPU

        1. MiguelC Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

          So, what you're really saying is that you have no idea how IT purchasing works in large orgs

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

            Yes, the company purchasing manager and their Dell account manager spend months going over the details of branch prediction microcode and the relative efficiency of L2 cache coherence in AMD vs Intel core design

            And then everyone under the rank of management get a Latitude

            I'm in charge of IT for our dept. I got asked how many VMs, how much storage and then a Dell model XYZ arrived to put in the rack. I never got asked what cpu I wanted

            1. collinsl Silver badge

              Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

              Then your org isn't necessarily the same as everyone else's because in a lot of places the choice of CPU is offered, in fact you're expected to choose the exact server(s) you need and then purchasing/finance go out and purchase them, or reject and ask you to re-cost.

    3. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

      Remember "nobody gets fired for buying IBM"?

      By rights, AMD should have achieved parity more than a decade ago, during the Opteron era, but the inertia is all the same.

      1. druck Silver badge

        Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

        That and illegal Intel Marketing campaigns.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

          That and Intel telling PC makers that if they sold AMD above some low end laptops they wouldn't get any Xeons or Intel gige chips for their servers

          1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

            I should have remembered all that

      2. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

        If things moved quickly enough for them to reach parity during the Opteron days, they would have lost every bit of that growth during the Bulldozer days.

  2. Guy de Loimbard Bronze badge

    There are some arbitrary decisions made in business by old and bold, non technical manglers and directors, who think "they know" tech and will then use their "seniority" to force a business decision based on bias, not knowledge.

    For instance, many moons ago, I had a manager demanding to know why "His IP Address" had changed on his work PC, can't remember why said manager knew his IP address, but after 15+ minutes trying to explain what DHCP does and why "His IP Address" doesn't matter in the context of a work network, I had to walk away and ask him to raise a ticket to get it "resolved"...

    Some times manglement know better.... apparently!

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Start with what matters ... to him in one sentence:

      1) Assigning IP addresses as required saves money compared to giving each computer a fixed IP address.

      If that is not enough go for:

      2) There is a limited supply of IP addresses. You could employ a human to keep track when computers are retired, what their IP address was and to assign disused addresses to new computers. The alternative is to have a computer automatically assign addresses when computers are turned on and add addresses back to the unused list when computers are turned off.

      If that isn't enough consider checking for a genuine problem: "Has assigning your computer a new IP address caused any software to fail?". If not, "Of course I can switch the company back to static IP addresses. I will need £X0,000/year of budget to replace the DHCP server with humans."

      The final option: update your CV and decide how much of a pay rise you would need to feel happy about dealing with this sort of crap.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Start with what matters ... to him in one sentence:

        Hmmmm ... could that person then ssh -X and/or "remote desktop" into that office deskside workstation from anywhere in the world?

        1. werdsmith Silver badge

          Re: Start with what matters ... to him in one sentence:

          There are multiple ways to skin that particular cat. A PC on your network really must be inside a layer or two of firewall anyway.

      2. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Start with what matters ... to him in one sentence:

        You can set your DHCP scopes so some IPs are not in the dynamic pool set those up as static.

        Or assign a reservation on the DHCP server so that MAC always gets the same address.

        Or a long lease.

        DHCP much better for portable devices, but the limit on IP addresses available for non internet facing NICs is unlikely to ever be reached. Even for safe range addresses.

  3. Panicnow

    Invisible ARMs

    In my household we use ARM Raspberry PIs for our home computing use and ARM tablets and ARM mobiles.

    Indeed the only x86s in our house are in old computers sitting in the garage!

    They are VERY CHEAP! and good enough for our purposes. My guess is there are many more of us.

    Working out how many RPi s are used as "Good Enough" PCs will be a challenge

  4. Dave81

    Absolute numbers?

    Would be great to know the absolute numbers here in terms of units sold and dollar value

  5. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Devil

    <-- Religeous wars that way .

    I bought a new Core i5 just last week. Am I a bad person? (Asking for a fiend friend).

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: <-- Religeous wars that way .

      That might be Intel's only advantage.

      Even I can work out that i3 is cheaper/slower than i5 which is less than an i7 and I can't afford an i9. I can easily tell that an i5-14700 is newer than an i5-10700 and might be comparable to an i7-6xxx

      AMD all the CPUs are Ryzen ? I assume a 9000 is better than an 8000 or 7000! What's a Threadripper and do I want one ? AMD sound a lot like they are still aiming at a niche market of enthusiasts who know all their internal code names. Like Porsche compared to Intel's BMW

  6. StargateSg7 Bronze badge

    Back in the 1990's when AMD Athlon-2 was KING of the desktop CPU's, even outperforming SERVER CPU's at the time on certain single or dual thread workloads, I was lucky enough to suggest that if we buy THOUSANDS of Athlon-compatible Motherboards from TYAN (i.e. a very respectable high-end motherboard manufacturer!) and rack as many of those motherboards in a simple 72 inch high rack as possible and put in lots of RAM (256 megabytes back in the day!) ...AND... turn the AGP-slot GPU card (i.e. No PCIx/e back then!) sideways with a right-angle connector, we could simply assign EVERY logged-in user their own racked motherboard and they would get two CPU cores each running single-threaded apps REALLY FAST! The AGP slot-based graphics card was also an ATI VGA-Wonder (i.e. ATI was bought by AMD!) with built-in NTSC video input/output so we could get financial video broadcasts to EVERY PC style. It was also fast enough to handle and do what we now call GPU-server work where the VRAM memory (usually 8 megabytes NOT gigabytes!) would be used to do spreadsheet calculations really really QUICK much faster than any Intel Server CPU setup.

    We were even able to do 10 megabits networking to do DISTRIBUTED processing saving even more time on financial transaction workloads. This setup cost us less than $5500 USD per computer and most of that money was spent on RAM chips and hard drives. For 2,000 Motherboards it was $11 Million USD total cost setup versus the $150 Million USD IBM quoted us for multiple mainframe computers to do the same work load but much slower than our AMD Athlon racked-mother-board system! Those saved millions of dollars were spend on buying the stocks and commodities the advanced FAST financial trading software that was running on all those systems was suggesting to buy based upon the very-advanced-the-back-then Grid-based processing software that was custom developed. It was a system that made the the company BUCKET-LOADS of money and lasted for at 6 years before being replaced with the same RACKED motherboards setup with with the cheaper and faster AMD four-core graphics-workstation-level CPUs and turned-sideways GPU cards!

    Even in the 1990's AMD was MUCH BETTER than Intel in raw single, dual and 4-core workstation thread performance!

    V

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