Tony said:
Of course the natural follow-up to this question is how much of the
total computing market does retail desktop sales account for? It's
all well and good to have the bulk of a niche, but when that niche
makes up only ~15% of the total market it doesn't necessarily mean too
much.
I can't say for sure, but I'm sure it's well over 15%. Retail sales
would include everything from the Future Shops/Best Buys to the little
mom'n'pops. So that's probably more than 50% of consumer sales. But
Intel always has the Dell card in reserve, the one 100% Intel shop that
makes up about 20% of the overall consumer market, if not just the
retail market. So with the Dell card Intel is still on top, overall.
One of the more interesting stats was that AMD now accounts for over
30% of retail notebooks sales already. I'd have been astonished to hear
that AMD is now in 10% of notebooks, let alone 30%!
This article has a better breakdown of the numbers:
AMD Takes the Lead in Intel's Red October
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1883864,00.asp
It seems Athlon 64's are now the biggest selling desktop CPUs among all
of them, Pentium, Celeron, or Sempron:
"AMD Athlon 64 chips were in 32 percent of desktops, during September,
almost double that of Intel's flagship, the Pentium 4. Intel's Celeron
D and Pentium 4 populated 20.5 and 17.8 percent of desktops,
respectively, while the AMD's Sempron was in 17.4 percent of desktops,
NPD figures show."