Reports coming out suggest that AMD has outsold Intel in the desktop market [1].
So it's official: CPUs are now in a two-player game. This is only good news for us CPU users, for the last 20 years we've watched and suffered the rise and rise of Intel's 8086 instruction set and their CPUs. It was mostly luck, and marketing: Intel, like Microsoft, got picked by IBM for the PC, and thus were handed the franchise deal of the century. The story goes that Motorola wouldn't lie about their availability date, and it was a month late for the MC68000.
Then, the task became for Intel to hold onto the PC franchise, something any ordinary company can do.
20 years later, Intel's luck ran out. They decided to try a new instruction set for their 64 bit adventure (named Itanium), thinking they could carry the day. It must have been new people at the helm, not seasoned computing vets, as anyone with any experience could tell you that trying a new instruction set in an established market was a dead loss. The path from 1983 to here is littered with the bodies: PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, ...
In the high end (which is now thought of simply but briefly as the 64 bit end) Itanium is outsold 10 to 1 by AMD's 64 bit ... which just so happens to be the same instruction set as its 32 bit 8086 line offering [2]. By leaving compatibility aside, Intel left themselves wide open to AMD, and to the latter's credit, they took their 32 balls and ran twice as fast.
Sometime about 6 months back Intel realised their mistake and started the posturing to rewind the incompatibility. (Hence the leaks of 64 bit compatibility CPUs.)
But by then it was way too late. Notice how in the above articles, AMD is keeping mum, as is Intel. For the latter, it doesn't want the stock market to realise the rather humungous news that Intel has lost the crown jewels. For the former, there are equally good reasons: AMD's shareholders already know the news, so there's no point in telling them. But, the more it keeps the big shift out of the media, and lets Intel paper up the disaster, the slower Intel is in responding. Only when the company is forced to admit its mistake from top to bottom will it properly turn around and deal with the upstart.
In other words, Intel has no Bill Gates to do the spin-on-a-sixpence trick. So AMD is not trying too hard to let everyone know, and getting on with the real business of selling CPUs against an internally-conflicted competitor. They've cracked the equal position, and now they have a chance of cracking leadership.
Keep quiet and watch [3] !
[1] AMD desktops outsell Intel desktops 54% to 45%
[2] AMD Opteron outsold Intel Itanium by 10X
[3] You can buy this sort of education at expensive B-schools, or get it here for free: AMD Adds Athlon to its Fanless Chips
I find this swipe both absurd and unwarranted.
First, IBM/Sun/Moto did not "try a new ISA in an established market": rather their ISAs appeared at about the same time as x86 (keeping in mind that PPc is a successor of Power) and they just didn't catch on, that's all. In the lot only Alpha was a latecomer.
Second until recently the market for these chips was walled off and totally separate from the market for desktop chips, so the comparison makes no sense.
Third and lastly, even though the desktop and server chip market have now fused and the RISC chips are now feeling the heat there, too, Sparc, PPc and MIPS are still doing very well in the embedded market, so they are far from "dead bodies".
As for AMD having finally cracked open the Intel monopoly, maybe one reason why they are keeping quiet is that this isn't the first time they've had some success but it has usually been fleeting, as AMD has historically been plagued with execution problems. On the other hand some Intel chips have flopped before and Intel has recovered. So my opinion is that the fat lady hasn't sung on this yet.
Regards,
-- O.L.
Posted by: Olivier at September 16, 2004 10:06 AM