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AMD Grabs over 30% CPU Market Share as Intel Continues to Decline
- rwaksmunski 4y agoGreat job AMD, now do RISC V so Apple's M1 can get some competition.
- AlexandrB 4y agoIf they did, what OS would run on it? The only options I know of is Linux or one of the BSDs so you're either looking at the server market (where M1 is not a competitor anyway) or the Linux desktop market, which is small - nothing close to 30% of desktop/laptop PCs.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoI can see server market being a thing, as ARM is just now starting to make inroads there so there might be room for a new emergent RISC market, assuming it could be price/watt competitive. But I agree, it would be a tiny market. Another option is if AMD decided to get into the mobile / embedded SoC market for real, and didn't want to pay an ARM license to do it.
- quelsolaar 4y agoActually RISC-V is worse than x64 when it comes to performance per watt. It is designed to be very simple, not to be efficient. It does not natively have common instructions like add multiply. To make an efficient modern processor, you want to larger more specialized instructions that do more per clock cycle and have dedicated hardware for common tasks.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago"It does not natively have common instructions like add multiply"; this is is misinformation. Almost anybody implementing RISC-V -- esp if they are targeting an MPU instead of MCU -- is implementing instruction variants which include signed and unsigned multiply and divide, and my understanding is the P and probably V extensions include various add-multiply instructions. https://github.com/riscv/riscv-p-spec/blob/master/P-ext-proposal.pdf https://github.com/riscv/riscv-p-spec/blob/master/P-ext-prop... See section 3.2. The instruction set is specified in a 'modular' fashion and has standards for various extensions, including compact instructions, vector extensions, etc. Compilers like GCC and LLVM support targeting these extensions. I'm not saying AMD should make a RISC-V CPU, but if they were to hypothetically do that, they'd clearly be including a pile of the ratified extensions.
- monocasa 4y agoRISC-V is designed to be efficient; when compared on the same litho processes and gate counts it's very competitive wrt perf/watt.
- zik 4y agoYou might want to check your sources on that. Everything you said is wrong.
- mort96 4y ago> To make an efficient modern processor, you want to larger more specialized instructions that do more per clock cycle No, not really. The large specialized instructions in x86 run across many, many clock cycles. And IIRC, compilers will often generate a sequence of simple instructions rather than one complex instruction, because the CPUs are so much better at executing sequences of simple instructions. (And yeah, as others have pointed out, of course high end RISC-V chips have multiply and divide instructions with dedicated multiply and divide hardware.)
- pjdkoch 4y agoSuch a misleading title. > [...] AMD now has a market share of 31.3% (up from 28.5% in Q4 2021) versus Intel's 68.7% (down from 71.5%) That's not "grabbing over 30%" in my book. It's grabbing 2.8%.
- agnokapathetic 4y ago28.5% -> 31.3% is a 9.8% increase in ~1 year.
- password11 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/ We're always having this same rehashed argument over and over again on HN. "My [CPU manufacturer] grew by 100% this year." Market share is an absolute percentage, so you should talk about it using absolutes. It doesn't make sense to talk about relative increases unless we're talking only about AMD revenue without respect to the overall market.
- mypalmike 4y agoThe result of subtraction of percentages as you have done is typically given units in "percentage points" or "basis points" (with a scalar offset) in order to avoid ambiguity. The "percent change" or "percent increase" is calculated as is typical with any numerical change, (x1 - x0) / x0. https://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage-points.html https://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage-points.html
- hpen 4y agoI’m confused. Are you saying he straight up subtracted the larger number from the smaller?
- mypalmike 4y agoOh huh. I must not have been wearing my glasses. I thought that said 37.3. Which still is only 8.8 percentage points. But even doing the percentage difference, I calculate a 10.2 percent increase. So I'll just shut up and go face the corner with the parent poster.
- wincy 4y agoThis seems like a weird metric, CPU market share seems to only include actual drop in CPUs that go with motherboards, right? If that’s the case, wouldn’t the overall CPU market be shrinking as we get things like the M-Series MacBooks and Macs coming out? To me, the more interesting question is what does the overall market of compute devices that can be used in a fashion similar to what AMD and Intel sell (being charitable and leaving out mobile) look like and what percentage of that market do AMD and Intel make up? Has the overall market grown? Is it growing faster overall than the laptop/desktop/server/hpc space that intel and AMD are catering to?
- unxdfa 4y agoNot sure how long that'll play out. The 13th gen have barely been integrated in stuff and they seem to, at least on single thread, smash AMD in the price/performance ranking. 13700K is a beast of a CPU for not much money. Also the next two gens of Intel stuff is very different. At least AMD are giving them an ass kicking which they deserve. My PC has a 12400 in it which actually realistically kicks my M1 Pro MBP in the teeth on some things which is embarrassing as it's a junk ass end Lenovo desktop machine that cost <$500. We live in interesting and exciting times.
- hummus_bae 4y agoWhen they come down in price they should be a damn good buy since it looks like they're much more efficient than AMD chips
- sliken 4y agoKeep in mind the prices are changing quickly as of late. AMD brought out the 7700, 7900, and 7950 (non-x) that are cheaper, generate less heat, and include a fan. There's also been pretty heavy discounts on the 7700x/7900x/7950x AMD chips as well. DDR5 and Motherboard prices for the am5 chips are dropping as well. Microcenter is even including 8GB free with a CPU purchase. The price/perf of the AM5 platform has changes quite a bit in the last month. Intel does win some benchmarks, but often at substantially higher power consumption. The AMD chips run cooler and even significantly reducing the TDP down to 65 watts often has a single digit percentage slow down.
- unxdfa 4y agoThe cost in the 7000 series is the motherboards at the moment. They're still extortionately priced. 2x the price of an equivalent Intel one and that hasn't changed. It's improving but nowhere near reasonable. The AM4/B550 combo is still pretty good however. 99% of what I do is single thread bound so I really want to see some single thread power benchmarks but no one seems to bother with those. I'm in the market for a PC with the best single thread performance out there at the moment so I've got several machines configured in pcpartpicker and spreadsheets at the moment :(
- dawnerd 4y agoI really need to upgrade my personal media server but both companies' CPUs just use way too much power. It's kind of ridiculous. Yes, they're fast but power hungry as heck. Makes my dual xeons I run now look energy efficient.
- piinbinary 4y agoHave you looked at the power draw of the non-X variants of AMD's cpus? It might be closer to what you are looking for.
- thot_experiment 4y agoModern CPUs scale quite non linearly and the default set-point is where it is for marketing reasons. My i7-7800 can do 1 work for 70 watts, 1.25 works for 150 watts or 0.9 works for 38 watts. Just underclock/undervolt, problem solved.
- seniorivn 4y agohow much power do you need? you can buy arm, either sbc, if you don't need performance at all, or apple mini, if you do
- sliken 4y agoThe 7700/7900/7950 have a 65 watt TDP, idle much lower, and can be underclocked if you want lower. I certainly wouldn't consider 65 watts as "power hungry as heck". Did you by chance read an Intel i9 review? Yes, Intel's going crazy on the power front trying to match the AMD performance, which of course lead to AMD pushing it a bit as well. But the new non-X AMD CPUs are quite power efficient for the performance. If that's still to much the M2 or M2 Pro in a mac mini is rather efficient on power and still performance quite well.
- nottorp 4y agoAs a cpu buyer, I'd like amd and intel to get stuck at 50-50 market share and fight tooth and nail by introducing cheaper and faster models every year. And maybe discover low power computing, although that's wishful thinking.
- sagarm 4y agoYou can set lower power limits for both AMD and Intel's chips to improve perf/watt. AMD benefits more than Intel when doing so. Here's some more reading if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17641/lighter-touch-cpu-power-scaling-13900k-7950x https://www.anandtech.com/show/17641/lighter-touch-cpu-power...
- nottorp 4y agoI can and I have. There's a ryzen limited to 70 W in the bios under my desk :) 99.99% of the population doesn't know this option exists. And 0.01% want BIGGER NUMBERS OMG 720FPS!!! and ruin power consumption worldwide for everyone else.
- sliken 4y agoI blame Intel for that. They pushed the clock speed high for silly small perf gains. AMD could take the high road, then media would brag about how fast Intel is and AMD would lose market share.
- MrFoof 4y agoIndeed. The game Intel used to play is now the game everyone plays -- Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, for both consumer CPUs and GPUs. At least on the desktop. They tend to run them to redline by default, because numbers. It's all about getting that big splash at launch, to ride it for higher average sale price as long as possible. Which is unfortunate, because when it comes to benchmarks, understanding the context of a test setup is extraordinarily important. Are you buying that very high-end memory the test setup used and then manually adjusting timings? No? Then you're not getting those numbers. Heck, you may be losing 20% or more performance compared to the test rig on just the difference in memory. Never mind adjusting other things, ensuring the system's thermals are entirely kept in check to prevent throttling, etc.
- aetherspawn 4y agoWe bought a $9000 single socket AMD (2.4 GHz) 40 core server from Dell and a $27,000 dual socket Intel (2.8 GHz) 100 core server from Dell. The AMD server is at full load, using around 150W whereas the Intel server idles at 450W doing absolutely nothing and pushes up to 700W if we load it up. In hindsight, I regret not just buying 3 of the AMD servers for the same price. I had this fallacy that the Intel server would be magically more energy efficient, but that has turned out to be FUD and baloney. NB Power usage measured at the wall socket with voltage and current monitored PDUs.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoSounds like there is something else going on there, since the Xeon CPU idle power consumption is nowhere near 200W [0] [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16594/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-scalable-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16594/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-scal...
- helf 4y agoRight? That is why I want to know more details instead of this vague garbage.
- helf 4y agoNot to mention the fact that "pushing up to 700W underload" is.. absolutely nothing since that means, ignoring everything else and just assuming CPU drawing that, the cores are only using 7w PER CORE. And this AMD system is using apparently a peak of 3.75w per core? really?
- TOMDM 4y agoThese is missing something. Looking at just the Q4 2022 numbers: AMD Desktop CPU Market Share 18.6% AMD Mobility CPU Market Share 16.4% AMD Server CPU Market Share 17.6% AMD Overall x86 CPU Market Share 31.3% What's causing the bump from 16%-18% share to 31% in the avgs? Are they including game consoles in the x86 market share?
- vondur 4y agoI assumed it's due to their server chips being way more efficient, powerful, and cheaper than the equivalent parts from Intel.
- neogodless 4y agoThat is not an answer to the (math) question they were asking.
- zxexz 4y agoYeah this must be it. In my experience new AMD server chips are better in pretty much any way, for most workloads. Everybody I know seems to agree. It just doesn't make economic sense to go Intel for new servers.
- vondur 4y agoI found this bit from networkworld.com: "In the server market, AMD's total market share grew from 10.7% at the start of 2022 to 17.6% at the end of the year, while Intel fell from 89.3% at the start of the year to 82.4%. Interestingly, the server chips that are selling the most aren't the newest and greatest models" Hard to tell what calculations are being used to derive the percentages. Maybe they are using dollar amounts per total spending on all chips, and server chips cost more, therefore driving the market share numbers?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- forty 4y agoI understand that the 3 first statistics include non x86 CPUs
- swamp40 4y agoAMD also has chipsets that are making their way onto motherboards. Video, PCI, USB, etc. We had a problem with an HID device of ours that would work fine with the ubiquitous Intel USB chipsets for the last 10 years, but didn't work properly with the AMD USB chipset on a new laptop. So Intel is losing chipset share, too.
- hnburnsy 4y agoWhat would be even better than this duopoly would be three or more players. I was disappointed when Windows Mobile folded as look what we are stuck with now. Sucks that markets like this devolve into only two major players like consoles, mobile OSes, CPUs, GPUs, commercial aircraft, rail freight....sigh.
- andy_ppp 4y agoApple design their own silicon too, it’s a shame they aren’t interested in the data centre given what an advantage they could have in the coming AI wars. They need to wake up on that one and get an ecosystem for AI that could potentially lead to them winning.
- andy_ppp 4y agoWhen are AMD 3nm part expected? Mid 2024?
- monocasa 4y agoThat's still up in the air. Probably with Zen5, but if the price isn't right they're apparently taping it out for N4 (ie. N5++++) too to hedge their bets/negotiating position with TSMC for wafer prices.
- bzmrgonz 4y agoholy cow that's a big chunk of marketshare.
- bob1029 4y agoFrom an investor perspective, AMD was a fantastic story due to Intel's 10nm process slip. AMD also got the jump on MCM which is arguably the most disruptive innovation in the mix. I think the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. Intel is catching up and surpassing in some important areas already. I've held positions both in AMD and Intel over the years. Right now I am long INTC.
- chx 4y agoTo give you some context: before Zen, their high was 25.3% in the fourth quarter of 2006. This was the year Intel shipped the first Core CPUs and in 2007 AMD shipped the K10 architecture. Their pre-Zen low came in at 11.6% in the first quarter of 2016 but even with Zen the turnaround was not immediate as you can see in the 10.6% in Q3 2018. And while their discrete GPU market share is in decline -- and since they bought ATI they never had the lead, indeed it never went above 40% https://overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2022/11/29160939924l.jpgpg https://overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2022/11/29160939924l.jp... it seems they still gain significant benefits from having them by selling a lot of APUs, especially in consoles.
- narrator 4y agoIntel stumbled badly on their new semiconductor fab development. Their next generation fabrication plants have been delayed for years and they are losing badly to TSMC, which makes AMD's chips. It would be interesting for someone to tell the story of why they failed where before they had cranked out new fabs process technology like clockwork.
- marcmarc 4y agoI recommend watching the YouTube channel Asianometry. He's covering this topic and more.
- lakomen 4y agoI always bought intel because whenever I bought AMD I regretted it. Now however Intel has low power cpu cores and high power cpu cores and I feel cheated. AMD has all full power cores.
- shmerl 4y agoI haven't used Intel since Zen 1 came out. Never regretted it.
- osigurdson 4y agoHey Intel, try this: 1) pay more for talent than anyone else. 2) treat your engineering staff amazingly well 3) watch your business completely turn around in two years
- myself248 4y ago2.1) Listen to them.
- catach 4y ago> 2) treat your engineering staff amazingly well You can lean hard into a certain flavor of this. But it means orienting internal incentives away from excellence of outcome. So it gets you modern Google (allegedly): https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf... Quickly, proper implementation of simple principles becomes complex.
- Sakos 4y agoThere's a wide canyon between Google and how awful Intel has been treating its engineers in the past decade.
- catach 4y agoSure, and I hope their treatment improves. My point though is that the two steps outlined above are likely insufficiently specified for turn-around success. At best.
- osigurdson 4y agoWhat is your suggestion for improving things at Intel?
- catach 4y agoWhy would you expect me to have suggestions for a specific case when I'm saying that the general problem is hard, not simple?
- bugbuddy 4y agoAs an Intel fanboy, I am sad to see my favorite team beaten by the competitor. I am holding out hope that their next processor will return them to the crown of price and price/performance. I am currently rocking an i7 3770k iMac 27” and I am ready to upgrade.
- wraptile 4y agoCould you elborate why are you an Intel fanboy? I'm not particularly versed in computer chip markets but isn't Intel perceived as awfully incompetent mega corporation that is sustained by the fact that it's very big not because of it's merits? What is there to be a fan of?
- oceanplexian 4y agoI'm not a fanboy, but the idea that you can fire up 20 year old software on the Intel and run it with insane single-thread performance (substantially more than M1 or AMD) is why they are still top dog. It takes a certain level of technological sophistication that is more impressive to me than bolting on more cores. On a practical level, there are a ridiculous amount of games, simulation, scientific and engineering software that falls into that category and asking people to re-write tens of thousands of lines of code to take advantage of a new architecture isn't happening.
- dehrmann 4y ago> awfully incompetent mega corporation That overstates how bad it is. Over time, it feels like they slipped to being a year or two behind in both fab and chip design, and it didn't become apparent until ~3 years ago. The reason it's not that bad is Intel rushed out some chips that are competitive with AMD chips, and despite their process difficulties, there are still only a handful of companies that can make these chips. What's actually bad is that they lost Apple. It motivated a lot of places (including Microsoft) to seriously look into ARM.
- Dalewyn 4y agoI'm an Intel fanboi. Objective factors: Much more reliable overall with significantly less jank compared to AMD, especially on the software side of things. Much better power draw at idle and low use. Onboard GPU for practically every CPU, with only very explicit exceptions; great for video encoding (QuickSync!) or when shit hits the fan. Better single thread performance compared to AMD for no personally-practical loss in multithread performance. Geopolitical factors: Less reliance on the Taiwan Singular Egg Basket(tm) problem. Personal factors: Sentimental value, I grew up with Intel CPUs and I owe a lot of who I am today to them; I have an Intel Inside. The Intel chime is up there with the Windows 95 and 98 boot chimes for defining my 20th century.
- philliphaydon 4y agoHow does does AMD/Intel stack up against ARM with something like Amazon's Graviton instances? It seems /a lot/ of the people I know are moving from Intel/AMD to ARM, I suspect the move is bigger than I expect. So I'm wondering if that's chipping away at Intel/AMDs market share.
- sofixa 4y ago> How does does AMD/Intel stack up against ARM with something like Amazon's Graviton instances? From what I've seen, poorly - Gravitons are significantly cheaper (10-30%) for similar performance, workload dependant*.
- ijidak 4y agoWatching an Asianometry episode, I was surprised to see that Intel contributed significantly to ASML's development of EUV. But I also heard somewhere that Intel, until recently, refused to buy ASML's EUV machines. Trying to go it mostly alone on EUV lithography. Are both of these facts really true? Seems insane that Intel would help ASML develop EUV and then watch competitors buy the machines and reap the benefits.
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoI wish this was the case on the GPU side too. Nvidia is playing by their rules and everybody follows.
- temptemptemp111 4y ago[dead]
- tw1984 4y agoAMD should give desktop CPUs more PCIE lanes and memory channels.
- lvl102 4y agoIf AMD sells SoC on standard MB sizes, they’d definitely take the gaming market. They’re getting impeded by MB manufacturers price gouging.
- up2isomorphism 4y agoThis shows how dangerous it is when a real tech expert becomes the ceo of a large company
- danrocks 4y agoAren’t the CEOs of both Intel and AMD technical experts? Not sure what your point is.
- up2isomorphism 4y agoYou call someone started as CFO an chip expert? Obviously you have 0 idea about what you are talking about.
- wseqyrku 4y agoEvery possible forum on the Internet is biased towards AMD. Apparently HN is no exception.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThis is good for competition sake, that's for sure. But the PC market will continue to suffer under these missed opportunities: - DRAM price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 4x more memory or more for the price we pay these days - SSD price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 2x more SSD capacity per cost - ARM in PC is still being foot-dragged. I have no faith that Intel can make an M1/M2 competitor or killer, but AMD, Samsung, and Qualcomm should be able to do it. I mean, Amazon/Aws have their own ARM chips. - compact low power PCs like raspberry-pi type form factors (or the PC stick, or similar) are ripe for the taking. I have tower case PCs from 5-10 years ago that should be replaceable with a 3"x3" cube design, or imagine a base power supply where you take some sort of FrameworkPC-style headless notebook blades and they sit vertically on the base. The ports all face you. If it was a great multiple-4k display super-KVM, heck yes. - AMD, Qualcomm, and Samsung should be pushing a linux desktop initiative. Microsoft and Windows are really holding back PC units with their awful OS releases. The disaster of Windows 8 has not really been fixed, and they frankly don't care. A better-than-OSX linux is out there and it is low hanging fruit. The PC market is so ripe for major innovation. It is stuck with crappy motherboard and case form factors. Intel has ALWAYS sucked at platform leadership. AMD (and/or Samsung and/or Qualcomm) don't have to be. I really hope if AMD hits 50% at some point they can push more platforms to create new markets and segments for their processors and graphics chips. Intel is beyond saving, they have never understood platforms, software, and their management is moribund in penny pinching and monopoly rent extraction. Apple still treats the PC market as an afterthought. They have the moxie and hardware/software to do something, but they aren't open enough. Qualcomm might simply be too OEM-focused to show this kind of leadership, and they'd need a major ARM PC CPU, and that is five years off. Samsung is too samsung ecosystem focused. They are not open enough. AMD is, for better or worse, the one with the market position and innovation ability to create new PC opportunities. They don't have the subservient history to Microsoft. They have more EU/world focus, and those markets should be interested/open to non-Microsoft computing. And that is the path to long term market relevance. Intel may still come back, and they have pseudomonopoly powers and relationships with big business to relegate AMD. AMD needs to continue execution in x86, but do what I described: ARM/Apple M1/M2 competitor, Linux/Steamdeck desktop OS initiatives, and push more revolutionary small form factor computing platforms. It will hedge against Intel's monopoly powers and open new markets that Intel has shown utter inability to compete in historically. And frankly, with the "Moores Law" family of macro-trends stalling more and more, the path to more CPU and GPU sales isn't just a faster better chip. It's getting chips into more packages, places, and uses that people currently have them. Form factors and packaging are going to make MORE of a difference for upgrading. Right now, if I could get some sort of fancy framework-style compact notebook-that-is-a-thin-but-upgradable-desktop computer in a neat package, that's a much more compelling buy than a machine that has, what, maybe real world 10% PERCEPTIBLE performance improvement over something from 5 years ago? Realistically this should have been in full swing with the COVID boom. Not sure if the penny pinchers will allow such "radical" investment (the non-ARM initiatives might take, what a billion a year froma 26 billion a year company?)