Article: AMD's Mobile Strategy
By: Doug Siebert (foo.delete@this.bar.bar), January 6, 2012 7:51 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Alex M (adm@hotmail.com) on 1/6/12 wrote:
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>Doug Siebert (foo@bar.bar) on 12/31/11 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>I would suggest that the large majority of new PCs are purchased for other
>>reasons than that there is a real need for more CPU performance. If
>>Intel announced tomorrow that it had reached the limit of Moore's Law, and
>>could not make future generations of CPUs any faster than the current
>>generation, I doubt it would have all that large of an effect of PC sales.
>
>How do you explain Intel's 80% to 90% market share? My explanation is that Intel
>sells higher performance CPUs than AMD and most people are willing to pay a price premium to get one.
The PC vendor chooses CPUs in PCs average people buy, not the people buying them. With Intel's history of anti-competitive behavior and the myraid of various rebate and bundling programs still available now, who's to say that Intel CPUs are more expensive to the PC vendors than AMD for a given performance level? In addition, there are other factors at work, such as power use and ability to supply as many CPUs as required (very important for vendors that sell a lot of a single model, such as Apple)
There are a lot of reasons for Intel to be more successful than AMD, and at this point its past success is the reason for its current and future success. That success means it has a ton of money it can invest in maintaining its process lead, which is one of the primary reasons for its all its advantages over AMD: in performance, manufacturing cost, and scale. AMD, on the other hand, had to give up on having its own fabs because its success was too intermittent to invest on anything like the scale Intel does.
The average guy buying PCs used to look at the megahertz number to determine what PC was "better". He had no idea what that number meant, or that this number on an Intel Pentium 4 couldn't be compared in any way to the number on an AMD Athlon. He wasn't buying based on performance, but on a mystical number he had been told at some point meant something (most likely by a clueless friend, or a salesman interested in selling him a PC with a higher price tag) Who knows what they look at now, but when they see "Intel core i5 model 2500K" or "AMD Phenom II X6 3.2 GHz", he sure as heck isn't making an intelligent choice based on the relative performance merits of the two CPUs versus his likely usage patterns!
Most likely they look at what has the almost lowest price tag (don't want to buy the cheapest one, just something a bit better than the cheapest one) or goes by length of the list of features listed on the little tag next to it in the local Best Buy. That's the only reason I can see for listing meaningless stuff like "5.1 stereo sound" on those lists, even though I've never met a single person who hooked up their PC to a 5.1 stereo system...
Even car buyers have an easier time of it, since at least 0-60 times gives him a real world idea of one dimension of the performance of a car...even if he never actually floors it from a standing start all the way to 60 mph.
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>Doug Siebert (foo@bar.bar) on 12/31/11 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>I would suggest that the large majority of new PCs are purchased for other
>>reasons than that there is a real need for more CPU performance. If
>>Intel announced tomorrow that it had reached the limit of Moore's Law, and
>>could not make future generations of CPUs any faster than the current
>>generation, I doubt it would have all that large of an effect of PC sales.
>
>How do you explain Intel's 80% to 90% market share? My explanation is that Intel
>sells higher performance CPUs than AMD and most people are willing to pay a price premium to get one.
The PC vendor chooses CPUs in PCs average people buy, not the people buying them. With Intel's history of anti-competitive behavior and the myraid of various rebate and bundling programs still available now, who's to say that Intel CPUs are more expensive to the PC vendors than AMD for a given performance level? In addition, there are other factors at work, such as power use and ability to supply as many CPUs as required (very important for vendors that sell a lot of a single model, such as Apple)
There are a lot of reasons for Intel to be more successful than AMD, and at this point its past success is the reason for its current and future success. That success means it has a ton of money it can invest in maintaining its process lead, which is one of the primary reasons for its all its advantages over AMD: in performance, manufacturing cost, and scale. AMD, on the other hand, had to give up on having its own fabs because its success was too intermittent to invest on anything like the scale Intel does.
The average guy buying PCs used to look at the megahertz number to determine what PC was "better". He had no idea what that number meant, or that this number on an Intel Pentium 4 couldn't be compared in any way to the number on an AMD Athlon. He wasn't buying based on performance, but on a mystical number he had been told at some point meant something (most likely by a clueless friend, or a salesman interested in selling him a PC with a higher price tag) Who knows what they look at now, but when they see "Intel core i5 model 2500K" or "AMD Phenom II X6 3.2 GHz", he sure as heck isn't making an intelligent choice based on the relative performance merits of the two CPUs versus his likely usage patterns!
Most likely they look at what has the almost lowest price tag (don't want to buy the cheapest one, just something a bit better than the cheapest one) or goes by length of the list of features listed on the little tag next to it in the local Best Buy. That's the only reason I can see for listing meaningless stuff like "5.1 stereo sound" on those lists, even though I've never met a single person who hooked up their PC to a 5.1 stereo system...
Even car buyers have an easier time of it, since at least 0-60 times gives him a real world idea of one dimension of the performance of a car...even if he never actually floors it from a standing start all the way to 60 mph.
