AMD Who?
New market research says AMD's percentage of workstation sales has dropped like a rock in 2007. And reports are starting to surface that the next Intel CPU release is serious trouble for AMD. (See "Will AMD's Fastest CPU Be Obsolete Next Month?" at ZD Net.)
It wasn't very long ago people were wondering if Intel had lost the fight in workstation CPU's, given how well AMD had been doing. The lesson here is obvious: Never trust a paranoid monopolist to play dead for long.
As 2006 began, reports Jon Peddie Research, Intel's Xeon was in a tailspin, while AMD's Opteron could do no wrong. In the robust market for workstations, the roles have since reversed, with first quarter results showing Xeon has grabbed back much of the share it had lost to Opteron.
Overall, JPR says the workstation market "continues to pleasantly surprise." As expected, quarterly growth rates have subsided a bit from the 25% - 35% increases (year-to-year) JPR had seen in late '05 and early '06, but they remain strong. All told, the industry shipped 674,000 workstations in the first quarter of '07, up 15.2% over the same quarter of '06. ASPs held flat, allowing revenue to also increase a healthy 15% to around $1.7 billion.
In workstations, Opteron had been steadily draining share from Intel's Xeon, peaking at over 13% of dual-socket platforms for Windows-compatible workstations in Q2'06. But Q2'06 not only market the peak of Opteron's incursion, it marked the beginning of a significant fall. JPR reports that in Q1'07, AMD's share of the dual-socket capable segment (where Opteron was strongest) didn't simply flattten but actually dropped by over 50% year-to-year.
|
Vendor |
Q3CY05 |
Q4CY05 |
Q1CY06 |
Q2CY06 |
Q3CY06 |
Q4CY06 |
Q1CY07 |
|
Xeon |
93.4% |
90.9% |
87.6% |
86.7% |
89.1% |
88.9% |
92.0% |
|
Opteron |
6.6% |
9.1% |
12.4% |
13.3% |
10.9% |
11.1% |
8.0% |
Table 1 Xeon vs. Opteron in market for dual-socket, Windows-compatible workstations. (Courtesy Jon Peddie Research)
"We'd expected AMD's share to moderate or level off by the time Intel improved its dual-socket Xeon platform in mid '06, but we hadn't anticipated the decline we've seen," commented analyst and JPR Workstation Report author Alex Herrera. "The extent of Intel's rebound will put that much more pressure on AMD to deliver quad-core Barcelona soon - and with better performance than Xeon."
In the overall workstation market (including higher-volume single-socket systems), AMD had risen to a peak of 3.6% in Q2'06, contracting to 2.0% in this last quarter.
Moments after this photo was taken, the rock identified itself as an Intel employee and crushed the AMD shooter.
