AMD's CPU sales are miles better than Intel

https://www.pcguide.com/news/amds-cpu-sales-are-unsurprisingly-miles-ahead-of-intel-as-first-9800x3d-launch-numbers-published/

by doener • 2 years ago

95 85 2 years ago

pcguide.com

sva_• 2 years ago

(based on numbers from German retailer Mindfactory)

zambal• 2 years ago

Yeah, the title feels a bit misleading, because it's only true in a very narrow context.

lgbr• 2 years ago

As another commenter noted, this is data from the German online shop MindFactory, which could be understood as the German equivalent to NewEgg. MindFactory would probably overrepresent enthusiast and small business customers, and underrepresent your average consumer who would rather buy their laptop from a big box store (MediaMarkt/Saturn) or enterprise customers, who probably buy directly from Dell/Lenovo/HP/Fujitsu.

hrtabf• 2 years ago

Yes, the CPUs listed are in the range where customers cannot perform expensive experiments (buying both Intel and AMD to test) and rely on review sites.

Personally, when I first got access to an Epyc, I was underwhelmed by the performance. For numerical performance it was slightly worse than M2 or cheap old Intel processors. I'm now a bit skeptical of reviews.

wordofx• 2 years ago

^ things that never happened.

echoangle• 2 years ago

Can you say which Epyc processor? And in what benchmark it was worse than which old intel processor?

bayindirh3• 2 years ago

I'd rather talk in SPEC scores if we're talking about Epyc and Xeon processors, and in TOP500 lists and national supercomputing centers, but you do you.

grues-dinner• 2 years ago

I listened to a review that said an i7 Thinkpad was cool and quiet with an 8-10 hour battery life. Fans scream at the slightest load, it's 45 degrees constantly and the battery life is 3 hours if you don't touch it and 1 hour if you do. And digging deeper, that's just normal for them. Serves me right for trusting a "real" reviewer.

Should have insisted on a Framework, by the sounds of it, it would actually have at least not worse battery life.

perbu• 2 years ago

Thanks! Even if this is only the enthusiast crowd, they're typically ahead of the curve, by a year or two, so Intel can't affort to ignore this. At some point the there will be less willingness from Dell/HP/Lenovo/Fujitsu to buy a subpar product.

smolder4• 2 years ago

The hatred towards intels 28x cpus from reviewers seems overblown to me. They are still pretty good chips that beat AMDs single chiplet offerings in cinebench, with decent efficiency. They're kind of just 2nd best at everything, whether thats multicore, single core, efficiency, or gaming... which to me doesn't seem bad, taken as a whole.

ChrisRR4• 2 years ago

Maybe. The enthusiast market doesn't necessarily represent the average consumer.

Just look at how many products people buy based on cost alone

dep_b• 2 years ago

Also Germans in general are more into alternatives like Firefox, Linux, etcetera as they have a healthy distrust to Big Tech. Even though if AMD is quite big itself it was more liked by a lot of enthousiasts there even when their performance was seriously lagging.

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

Sometimes that healthy distrust devolves into tinfoil hattery. The French also have such a distrust but I never got that neurotic vibe from them.

JonChesterfield• 2 years ago

The last couple of generations of desktop Intel chips are burning out at stock settings. The current leading edge is both faster and cheaper on AMD, despite being on an older TSMC process. 90% market share to AMD in the DIY/component market in that context seems low.

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

I wouldn't really say it seems low in that context considering IIRC not even NVIDIA has a 90% market share in GPUs.

N_A_T_E• 2 years ago

I’ve had trouble verifying that these chips still have reliability problems after the microcode updates. There seem to be a lot of anecdotes, but pc manufacturers are reporting normal rates of warranty return. It’s possible long term reliability is worse but it’s pretty easy to stress test a CPU.

Anyway, would love to hear if anyone has some decent quality data about these chips reliability.

newsclues2• 2 years ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OVdmK1UGzGs

ChrisRR4• 2 years ago

I don't follow PC hardware at all but recently I'm looking into replacing my 10 year old gaming PC and would normally just throw in an upper-mid range Intel CPU and be done with it

But with the recent failures of intel CPUs it's had me looking into AMDs to find the equivalent. I don't want to risk my investment not lasting because it just burns out over time.

(Also I like the fact that each generation doesn't have a new socket unlike intel)

facialwipe2• 2 years ago

The Ryzen X3D CPUs are really the best value out there for gaming.

blkhawk• 2 years ago

especially long term - boy does the 5800x3d have legs.

ChrisRR4• 2 years ago

I got a bit confused by the X3D CPUs as many places listed X3D is the equivalent to the largest i5. But on the flip side the latest X3D is a few years old so I didn't know why it's better than the more recent version of their non-X3D CPUs

homebrewer• 2 years ago

AMD had a similar problem which was caused by some motherboards pushing the SoC voltage too high (because it provides better overclocking). If you want to be careful (and it looks like you are), stay away from the latest hardware and avoid overclocking (or learn the theory and configure everything yourself -- if you do any automatic overclocking, voltages set by most motherboards are still higher than what I'm personally comfortable with; usually you can push them way down without affecting stability, but it takes hours of trial and error).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTngvvD5dI

smolder4• 2 years ago

Intels 12000-14000 chips were ironically only having problems when cooled well, because before the latest microcode they would ramp up the voltage too much with sufficient cooling. When run ragged at high temps they were reliable even before the updates.

wccrawford• 2 years ago

I recently had a problem that I thought might be the CPU, mobo, or RAM, and was looking at upgrading. For the same reasons as you, I also decided I'd get an AMD this time. The only real choice seemed to be the 7800X3D for a gamer. (Though now the 9800X3D is out, so that's probably the better choice.)

Luckily, after my computer locked up and rebooted enough times, I realized it always happened while saving the game. I replaced the C: drive's NVME and that fixed the problem, so that upgrade can be put off again for a while.

whatever13• 2 years ago

Intel reminds me of a skyscraper demolition. At first, it barely falls, but then boy does it fall fast.

They kept missing market after market after market. It’s insane how many chances they had, and they blew them all.

Anyway, now they are a taxpayer’s problem, for the same reason that Boeing is.

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

I honestly think that they were just too big.

People think of Intel as just doing CPUs, but they had a massively broad impact, from scientific computing libraries to compilers, to plenty of other hardware offerings. It's not actually obvious they needed to jump onto mobile, GPU, etc, they just needed to continue to have the best processors around. They don't any more, at least not obviously.

They can 100% survive as the second-best US-based processor producer, esp if they focus and do well, but they cannot be as large as they are and be number 2. Intel has 5x the employees of AMD.

whatever13• 2 years ago

But they do have Fabs. Fabs are hard.

varjag• 2 years ago

I'm not sure this perception is correct: Intel had diverse products from the earliest days with own series of ROM, SRAM and so on. They never were a cpu boutique.

7thpower• 2 years ago

A few years ago while I was working for a large enterprise I was brought in by our CTO to understand what IoT problems Intel could help us solve.

I remember saying ‘unless it has something to do with their connectivity solutions, none, because they no longer have a viable edge compute architecture for our use cases’, but I was assured they were willing to ‘co-develop’ and I may be surprised. Indeed the end of this statement alone was surprising, because why would any company of Intels scale want to co-develop with a mid size enterprise for an internal facing use case?

I won’t go into great detail but it turns out: - they had no new product in the pipeline, I never did figure out what there was to ‘co-develop’

- their solution was to install $1k NUCs at the edge instead of $100 RPI derivatives

- their busy bodies were willing to discuss just about anything because they evidently did not have a very firm remit, and we had our own busy bodies that also loved to pursue passion projects that had no business value

- they evidently had a lot of these ‘solutions’ teams that were kind of roaming around to… do something… with large companies, that was not really related to selling hardware or services

It just struck me as incredibly odd that a notoriously stubborn company that was so content to focus on ultra high margin products was wasting so many resources talking to customers about point solutions that would never scale into a meaningful business.

I ended up giving the CTO my grim assessment on the initiative and going to focus on other things. A part of me thought maybe I was just missing something and the teams would come back with something useful, but I never heard about any of it again. Good riddance.

arp242• 2 years ago

Remember the Pentium 4/Netburst era? They bounced back pretty well from that with the Core CPUs.

Intel is still tons more successful than 99.9% of companies out there. Specifically, they're still doing a $54 billion/year revenue, making it the ~260th largest company in the US (by revenue). This entire "if you're not leading, then you're losing" type of winner-takes-all mindset is fairly silly.

whatever13• 2 years ago

For processors it’s a bit different I believe. We care about cost, efficiency and raw power. If you are not leading in at least one dimension you are completely dead.

You are literally leaving money on the table if you pick a processor not leading one of these (or being very good at 2-3 of these).

Guthur• 2 years ago

The Core were good but also AMD fumbled with bulldozer which left them floundering until the Zen era.

AMD has been doing pretty well from a strategic point of view, specifically in high volume data centre SKUs, and so it's hard to see Intel being given as wide a window this time. And there are now also other players looking to take some market share, most notably Nvidia, but also all the big players are looking at their own in house ARM silicon.

The road back for Intel is not going to be nearly as wide and smooth as it was for Core.

panick21_• 2 years ago

Well Intel used its massive monopoly and market domination to prevent all the biggest providers from using AMD. To a point where AMD literally couldn't give away chips for free.

In some years Dell profitability basically depended on them not selling any AMD, because if they did, they would get the massive subsidy from Intel. These company were losing market share because they couldn't sell AMD systems, but that was preferable to not getting rebates.

This lead to massive anti-trust style lawsuits in Europe, the US, Japan and other places, and basically it lead to a 10 year legal battle that only ended because AMD was simply out of money to continue to fight the legal fight. So the made a settlement to get some cash.

If intel didn't have such insane market dominance, incredibly balance sheet and high margin for all the legal battle and all the fines, AMD would have really, really hurt them in the 2000s. But they could sustain the fight long enough and when AMD made a misstep, and Intel didn't, AMD crushed.

AMD kind of saved itself with consoles sales and then managed to turn it around with Zen.

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

The problem is not today but tomorrow where it's competitors are going to smaller and smaller nodes.

Also Tsmc keeps 50+% margin so does Amd so actual cost of processor is less than 20% of sale price. Intel foundry seems uncompetitive let alone it's current processor architecture.

ywvcbk5• 2 years ago

successful than 99.9% of companies out there

Depends on how you define that, I’d bet that 99.9% of all companies aren’t losing billions of $ every quarter while their revenue is declining even more. Also while simultaneously failing in pretty much every market segment they operate in..

piva00• 2 years ago

Anyway, now they are a taxpayer’s problem, for the same reason that Boeing is.

And the same way as Boeing, Intel spent a fucking lot of money doing stock buybacks.

Looking back at the charts it's to the tune of US$ 14bi just in 2020, another US$ 13bi in 2019, US$ 10bi in 2018 and the trend continues into 2011, a brief respite during the 2008-2010 crisis period.

US$ 152bi has been spent by Intel since 1990 in stock buybacks but the largest share of it is from the past 10-15 years.

Panzer04• 2 years ago

While that is true, Intel has probably spent more on R&D than all of their competition put together. That they still fell behind is indicative of their failure to execute, but it's not for lack of spending.

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Must be in datacenter use, since they've still got a 70% majority [0] in home use and it's barely dropping at all. Maybe gamers are some specific outlier that prefers Intel specifically, but all I hear them talking about are the X3D processors so it doesn't make any sense.

I think lots of people still buy Intel because AMD now charges a notable premium for their understandably vastly better hardware.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

Zekio• 2 years ago

steam hardware survey isn't affected very quickly by current sales

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Why not? It's a monthly survey, it should be impeccably up to date with what people are using.

It's also not accounting for things like the absolute flood of N100 mini pcs (since they're typically not gaming rigs) that sell for barely anything compared to the cheapest AMD offer. Granted they also suck, but Intel seems to have really invested themselves into the Chinese style quantity over quality, selling lots and lots of cheap crap which will influence any sort of percentage survey massively.

HelloNurse3• 2 years ago

If a PC lasts 40 months (might be more, might be less) and new CPUs have been out 2 months, assuming no growth of the market only 5% of PCs have been replaced in that period and therefore the impact on something like the Steam survey cannot exceed an increase/decrease of 5% compared to the previous aggregate results. Arithmetic is your friend!

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Well Ryzen (which is when AMD became a better choice) launched about 7 years ago, so AMD should've replaced most Intel CPUs since then given that it's like 84 months if that figure of yours holds, but the market share curve has basically been flat.

selivanovp2• 2 years ago

I'm in programming, not hardware, but people who's business is selling PC's told me that the main reason of continuing Intel dominance in long term manufacturers contracts, so laptops and prebuilt PC's are still dominantly based on Intel hardware, and that's what most people buy.

elorant• 2 years ago

Well I’m not surprised. If you want a CPU with only performance cores Intel has no offerings anymore.

atemerev• 2 years ago

Well, we have to support promising CPU startup underdogs like Intel! Yes, today they are small, but who knows what future holds.

Coffeewine• 2 years ago

I’m very curious as to what the American likely pending increased scheme of tariffs will do for intel. It seems like they could plausibly be the vastly cheaper option by this time next year for US residents.

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

i've read extensively on trump and watched a lot of interviews with him. he's hard to pin down, his speaking style is... interesting from what i gather he uses 'tariffs' like threats. but does not want to tariff actually.

two guys are bargaining for who gets to use a public fairgrounds. it's trump and some European guy. the fairgrounds are public, there should be no charge. trump will say "i will kick you in the foot every time you use these fairgrounds when i want them". the European will object, "that's not fair! that's bad business! it's a public fairground we all agree it's fair use". trump will reiterate that he does not care, he will kick you. the European can either agree or trump will stomp the foot.

if trump agrees with all the economists that tariffs are bad business and never implements them, he'll never get a deal. he has to credibly threaten tariffs to have bargaining power. he's very convincing doing this

personally, i believe the the amount of tariffs will be smaller than most people expect. but i wouldn't be surprised if i'm wrong.

isthatafact• 2 years ago

Intel also outsources to TSMC, I believe for most consumer chips, so not really very different from AMD. And I guess the trump tariffs would be mainly aimed at China not to CPUs made in Taiwan.

You may be referring to Intel future plans to use their own factories again with 18A, but I had the impression from the tech press that 18A volume will not be so great until 2026 (assuming things go well).

Besides that, Intel is not known for selling chips cheaply, so I would expect them to also increase prices if tariffs force their competitors to do so.

chrsw2• 2 years ago

My enterprise Intel based workstation from my job: loud, hot, slow, heavy, inefficient, loaded with security software, malware analyzers, phone home reporting, etc. Horrible experience.

My personal AMD laptop: thin, light, quick, long battery life. Pleasant experience.

fred_is_fred• 2 years ago

I'm not sure all the software you work forces on you is Intel's fault?

chrsw2• 2 years ago

No, but enterprises are stuck in their ways. So switching from Intel to AMD any time soon is about as likely as cleaning up the rest of this stuff.

selivanovp2• 2 years ago

Well, stats are dubious as it's from a specific shop, but in general, Intel has to be punished for their marketing practices of the last several decades based on market dominance.

Every generation of processor requiring unique slot, remote backdoor integrated in motherboards and multiple vulnerabilities found in recent years is what forced me to switch to AMD several years ago, and my AM4 socket is supported up to this day, even new versions of processors are still provided.

bfrog• 2 years ago

Long term I wonder how healthy x86 is as a whole. It seems like only a matter of time before someone puts out risc-v aws/gcp/azure instances that compete, or puts out a laptop part on a chromebook that kills it.

The only thing holding back the wave is windows... and microsoft themselves seem somewhat open to the idea of not using x86 anymore.

bayindirh3• 2 years ago

Oracle is already giving tons of ARM processors (and RAM for that matter) in their free tier, and the performance is not bad for CRUD applications, docker, and a generalist dark server (i.e. a utility box for a sysadmin).

However, for the top tier of computation, vectorization, memory bandwidth and PCIe lanes are still important.

fmajid• 2 years ago

Well, yes, given Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors self-destruct if you look at them funny, it's not surprising. I am waiting for the Zen5 Threadripper to replace my Xeon.

AMD's CPU sales are miles better than Intel

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