Ten best selling CPUs on Amazon are all AMD chips | Hacker News Reader

Ten best selling CPUs on Amazon are all AMD chips

pcgamer.com

28 pointsdoener11 comments

This is the market for people building their own PC or upgrading a PC and buying their parts from Amazon which is a tiny portion of the total PC shipments but is an important leading indicator for the rest of the market. Intel still beats AMD in total CPUs shipped.

And this is the amazing fact that needs more study. AMD's been the easy choice for years. Why so slow to adopt?

* Consumer/Partner Inertia?

* Ability to produce to meet demand?

* Support?

* Compatibility?

Once had an IT person tell me they couldn't move to ryzen laptops because the way the system presented its network interfaces was incompatible with their management software. My charitable interpretation is that there's enough programs like this that prevent AMD adoption, while simultaneously AMD never seems to be in a rush to fix firmware or software problems.

Inertia, layman brand perception, anticompetitive behavior (Intel has been in court for 15+ years about this).

An example in the laptop space, Intel invested a lot in the marketing and designs of the Ultrabook classification. So customers ask for an Ultrabook from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. and those are only available with Intel CPUs. It’s taken several years for AMD mobile CPUs to work their way into high end designs.

Intel just can't stop floundering. Alder Lake and Arrow Lake were talked up a lot, but Alder Lake only approximately caught up to AMD, and Arrow Lake is still well behind.

I haven't had to build a PC in decades but I'm toying with the idea at the moment and there's not a chance I'd buy Intel ever again.

After Intel gen13, gen14 being self-destroying CPUs, the just launched new generation of chips from Intel disappoint in performance, often worse than previous two gens.

Meanwhile, AMD use less power and perform better, while supporting ECC memory (unlike Intel).

The x3d models are a class on their own, in games and other cache-sensitive tasks.

It is no surprise AMD is selling better.

I chose an Intel CPU in 2023 because I thought it had better single-core performance, but now I have had to check it doesn't suffer from any of the stability issues etc.

In the future I'll just pick AMD, their handling of these stability issues has really damaged my trust in Intel.

Fwiw, I had always been an AMD fan boy over the past 20 years as it felt right to support the underdog. I just bought an Intel last year for that very reason (and also to support Chip manufacturing in the US to maintain capacity in case of conflict in Taiwan).

Intel still has about twice the revenue as AMD, so I am not sure how to see them as an underdog -- they have really maintained a death grip on market share in some segments even when their chips have not been at all competitive.

And a big portion of Intel chips are now made by TSMC in Taiwan anyway. I have the impression that the US government will make sure they have enough money to get back to having their own competitive factories.

Besides that, due to their anti-competitive practices and other issues, I suppose I think the company does not deserve any charity -- they only stopped paying dividends a few months ago, and stopped stock buybacks a few years ago.

I think a better indicator is market cap. Here AMD is about 2x that of Intel.

A factor of 2 is within the noise, but I cannot really comprehend the concept of buying a product because their company stock is cheaper than their competitor. The only ones benefitting from that here are Intel investors who have held on despite the serious publicly visible company problems for at least the past 5 years, and then are surprised that their dividends have disappeared. Why do they deserve a gift?

If the goal is to encourage a competitive chip market, Intel stock price is healthy enough that it could be used to raise cash for the company if needed, so there is no significant imbalance there -- as opposed to 10+ years ago when AMD stock was much lower when they looked to be at risk at bankruptcy

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