AMD Tanking in Workstations, 1 in a Series

By Doug Barney

A decade or so ago AMD seemed on its last legs. The company’s only sales proposition was to sell clones of Intel chips cheaper than Intel.

Then AMD started taking chances. It pushed clock speeds to their heat-producing limits, caught Intel off guard with dual and multicore products, and when it came to 64-bits, it didn’t really give a hoot about Intel compatibility. The result was a graphics lover’s dream. Game machines and design workstations increasing had “AMD Inside” instead of Intel.

But Intel fought back with faster processors and aggressive pricing (and some hard-nosed negotiation and OEM perks) and has largely taken back the workstation market, at least according to Jon Peddie Research.

In the first quarter of this year, AMD’s Opteron fell to 8 percent market share leaving the Xeon with the remaining 92 percent. Sounds like the Intel monopoly is solidly back!

Do you care what vendor powers your workstation? Is 92 percent market good or bad for the market? Let us know by writing to [email protected].

For more information visit Intel here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.