AMD approaches '30%' x86 CPU market share, thanks to servers 'n' laptops Here's a new data point that will rile Intel up: AMD now accounts for nearly 30 percent of x86 CPU market share, and the chip designer got there during an industry downturn. This is according to analysts at Mercury Research, which said on Wednesday that AMD's x86 market share reached 27.7 percent against Intel in the first …
well its taken them nigh on 30 years so no big achievement really. and there are still software and platform compatibility to contend with.
There's always that one piece of software , Middle ware which wont run on AMD out there.
Some of us remember their first push at the Pentium Market and how they will come to dominate that in 1994.
Intel need the competition but they don't take nor ever really have taken AMD as a serious threat.
Maybe they will now !
>well its taken them nigh on 30 years so no big achievement really
Because upto now if you shipped AMD in anything other than a few agreed low end toys, you would suddenly find you couldn't buy Intel chips for your lucrative server line, or SSDs or Gige network chips
Now being ignored by Intel's salesmen isn't such a big threat
The only segment where AMD didn't gain market share from Intel in the first quarter was the desktop PC space
Intel has just brought a new generation of chips out; AMD's next big move will happen later this year. I for one will probably pick up a new AMD chip from the next generation (or if the performance isn't much better pick up a x59*0 for a good price)
We have periodically tried out AMD powered laptops and the result has nearly always been the same - the battery life on them is considerably lower than their Intel equivalents.
Now, this is likely not all AMD's fault to be honest - but manufacturers seem to build their AMD laptops that bit cheaper than their Intel ones. Overall quality usually seems lower.
So we end up sticking with Intel in laptops. Desktops though? More than happy to have an AMD chip in a desktop.
When was the last time you used an AMD laptop?
There was a trend for many years where AMD CPUs (and chipsets) were treated as budget only in the Laptop space (plus they didn't really perform as well as Intel back then), and as such all the OEMs paired them up with less than stellar other components, typically with an aim to keep costs down (less and slower memory, cheaper SSD, inefficient power delivery, smaller battery etc etc).
Once Zen/Ryzen came out, from what I understand AMD worked closely with OEMs to basically get them to treat Ryzen as a first class citizen and put the same sort of quality components into the newer laptops, at least in the mid tear upwards. As AMD were making it clear, they were going to be marketing Ryzen as a premium product, (at least with the top end chips).
We have found the reverse! Although the 8th Gen Intel chips were great, since then we find on laptops that have say Intel i5 11th Gen (compared to Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7) runs much hotter with the associated noisy fans, and lower battery life. This seems consistent with Lenovo laptops such as ThinkBook 15 and the cheap V14s and Ideapad. We have had a number of WiFi and WiDi compatibility issues with the Ryzen laptops, though that doesn't relate to the processor itself, the laptops had IIRC a Realtek WiFi 6 card that is the issue. I've just had to price out the spec for replacement desktops for next year and it is interesting that for Lenovo there is virtually no difference in the price of Intel i5 vs Ryzen 5 (Lenovo M70 vs M75).
I think there's some history here to your observation. AMD historically being the budget option means that testing of the nature you describe means they you might well be comparing the budget machines performance. K7 and P3 - TDP were roughly comparable; but P3 machines tended to be better made at that time. Early Core CPU's and Bulldozer? No contest, favours the Core architecture massively.
More recently, if you compare otherwise broadly equivalent AMD and Intel parts (so, any Ryzen to 7000-series and up Intels); the TDP definitely leans in favour of AMD. E-core Intels may shift that balance back a little. One would need a simulation of "low-level" workloads on both machines to compare life on this basis; not something many benchmarks do.
But if battery life is the criteria, really, you should be getting an M1 Mac which knocks spots off any X86 derivative. (Insert usual foibles of Apple yada).
The only mobile device I use that isn't tethered to a wall almost all of the time is a phone; I rarely need more than an hours battery life, if that, relocating it to another desk or meeting room.
The Intel Dell sat on my laptop right now is dumping out enough heat to be uncomfortable to use. If I'm giving it a heavy excel macro to do, it gets propped up on a table on top of a couple of bits of scrap, and/or a desk fan pointed at it. Battery life isn't remotely a concern. The high TDP and poor build quality, is!
DIsclaimer - the Dell is not by choice! Corporate-mandated garbage!
It all rather smacks of comparing performance stats of a BMW, Audi, Toyota & Peugeot. Functionally, they do the same job; with differing performance not really changing the service provision. Which one you actually would live with on cost/reliability/taste grounds is a different question to the performance figures.
CPU capability is such now that the limiting factor on almost all workloads (apart from those that should be dumped on a server farm) is the limit of the human driving it, not the processor.
The Epyc chips are a thing of wonder though.
The compute density is off the charts, even Sapphire Rapids won't compete here.
It looks like Zen4 based Epyc processors will have upto 96 Cores per socket, giving you 384 vCPU for a 2 Socket Pizza Box.
The only place where intel can compete is in the 4 Socket + area for very large memory configurations, even then it looks like a 2 socket Genoa could handle 12TB of memory assuming 1 slot per memory channel and 512GB Dimms.
Come on AMD produce a 4 Socket Box, that will even eat into the Intel 8 Socket business.
Apparently the Genoa 96 Zen4 cores are due out Q3 this year, so not far off.
There is also a Genoa-X variant later (Q1 2023), which is a repeat of the new Milan-X, so has a large L3 cache (supposedly the same 3D cache process as they did to the 5800X to create the 5800X3D).
Bergamo, is also out Q1 2023, that is up to 128 cores, but these are Zen4c cores, so lower power parts. (They max out at 400W for 128 'c' cores, same 400W as Genoa does for 96 full fat Zen4 cores).
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