David said:
Actually, I think the real issue why it was slow for AMD was that they
had to build up their brand reputation and get OEM design wins. I
think for the DP market, Intel can easily get the design wins...
Well yeah, that really is the real issue isn't it? Why did it take so
long for AMD to rack up OEM design wins? But I don't think, as you do,
it had anything to do with simply brand recognition. The design wins
seemed to start piling up all of a sudden within weeks of AMD launching
its lawsuit against Intel, as the spotlight of scrutiny shone on Intel.
I won't bore you with a rehash of all of the examples, you should know
them by now.
Do you really think that AMD's 65nm compaction will match Woodcrest?
Sure, it will catch up to the point where it's going to be close enough
so it doesn't matter. Even without architectural improvements, just a
simple die shrink will be enough to reduce power consumption and they
could also add larger caches if they wanted to at that point. But it
looks like AMD is set to introduce various architectural improvements
and that it's just waiting for the 65nm process to become available, so
it won't necessarily be just a simple die shrink.
Already there's indications that AMD's memory controller and
Hypertransport are getting ready to reassert their superiority within a
few months over the FSB. There are performance DDR2 modules coming out
at 1200Mhz/CAS4, 50% higher than DDR2-800, which only an AMD processor
can handle. The dual-channel DDR2-800 has already saturated the 1066Mhz
Conroe bus. If Conroe wants to use the DDR2-1200, it would need a
chipset revision that can handle 1600Mhz FSB.
The other issue which you are missing is that AMD has no marketshare in
mobile. They have about 15% of the consumer and small business (< 10
employees) market, and it goes rapidly downhill from there. AMD has no
presence in the 1000 employee+ market, and that won't change in the
near future.
15% is their overall laptop marketshare, not just their consumer and
small business share. But they seem to be holding closer to 30%
marketshare in the retail notebook market. But anyways, that miniscule
15% AMD overall marketshare seems to have been enough to cause Intel to
miss their mark by 4 million Sonoma chips.
As for the large business (1000+ employee) laptop market, sure Intel
probably holds over 90% of the market there, if not 100%. But frankly,
it's the least interesting part of the laptop market, even for Intel.
It's the oldest, most mature part of the laptop market, with the
slowest growth rates. This market probably provides Intel with some
steady upgrade business too, but this business is not growing. Large
businesses tend to layoff people more than they hire them; and when
they do hire somebody, they tend to assign them with a laptop from
somebody they previously had layed-off.
That's why Intel and everybody else are interested in getting more
consumers to buy laptops. But the consumer won't buy the expensive
laptops that businesses tend to buy. Frankly, a business doesn't care
what the price of the laptop is, because when a business buys a $2000
laptop, they're not really looking at the $2000 final price tag,
they're probably only looking at the $100/month lease-rate. But the
consumer looks at the $2000 price tag, and sees $2000. Consumers don't
tend to lease their laptops, unless you consider using a credit card a
kind of a lease? So value for the money has become the top priority in
the consumer laptop space.
