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Comment by orenlindsey | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently, they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's not even close.

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Marketing campaigns only go so far. They’ve been riding the “Intel Inside” slogan for 25 years.

In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles.

Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years.

That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t been paying attention for the last ten years, and don’t ask anyone who has.

>In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles.

Don't forget laptops. Intel has been terrible on laptops due to their lack of efficiency. AMD has been wiping the floor with them for years now.

2024 is the first year that Intel has released a laptop chip that can compete in efficiency. I hope Intel continues to invest in this category and remain neck and neck with AMD if we have any hope of having Windows laptops with decent battery lide.

I doubt most people actually care about efficiency in a laptop. My wife is my anecdotal example. She's had a mac for years but refuses to give Apple one more penny because they've been awful - had to replace her previous laptop motherboard 7 times until we finally had to sue Apple in a class action which resulted in them sending her current 2015 MBP, which has now aged-out of MacOS updates. Sucks that this computer is now basically a paperweight.

Anyway, in my questions for her about what she really cares about in a new laptop, power efficiency was not a concern of hers. She does not care about efficiency at all. All she cared about was a good enough screen (2560x1440 or better), and a fast CPU to run the new Photoshop features, and the ability to move it from one location to another (hence the need for a laptop instead of a desktop). I'd wager that for most people, the fact that it's a portable computer has nothing to do with how long the battery lasts away from an outlet. She can transport the computer to another location and plug it in. There are very few situations that require extended use away from an outlet, and even in an airplane, we often see 120V outlets at the seats. There's really no use case for her that puts her away from an outlet for longer than an hour or two, so efficiency is the least of her concerns in buying a new laptop.

So we went with a new Dell laptop with the Intel i9-13900HX, which beats the Apple M4 Max 16 Core in terms of overall performance in CPU benchmarks. I would have looked at an AMD based laptop, but the price on this Dell and the performance of the i9 were great, it was $999 on sale. It's got a decent enough screen, and we can easily upgrade the RAM and storage on this laptop.

I doubt she'd even care if the new laptop didn't have a battery at all, so long as she can easily stuff it in a bag and carry it to another location and plug it in. I feel the exact same way, and I recently bought a new (AMD based) laptop, and power efficiency was not a thing in my decision making process at all. The battery lasts a few hours, and that's plenty. I don't get a hard-on for battery life, and I'm not really sure who does. Are these people dancing around with their laptops and simply can't sit still and plug it in?

There is another angle at power efficiency: my work laptop is so bad, moderate load makes the fan spin and higher load creates a very annoying noise due to the cooling needs. All these while performance is far from stellar (compared to my desktop).

I have plenty of people who care. Why? They always forget to plug in their laptop and then they want to open it and it's dead. Not to mention, x86 Windows machines do a poor job going to sleep.

Handed the wife M2 Macbook Air and she's thrilled how little she has to plug it in. She goes weeks between charges sometimes.

> her current 2015 MBP, which has now aged-out of MacOS updates

Not trying to invalidate or lessen your complaint (which I completely agree with) but want to make sure you are aware of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It's a little hacky by nature but can give some extra life to that machine: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

yeah, I looked at it, but this MBP has a speaker that died, the SD card reader died a long time ago, had to replace the battery, it's slow, and it doesn't really play nicely on the SMB network, etc, etc. I'll be glad when it's gone. And OpenCore patcher seemed like a lot of hassle to keep putting up with this machine. Thanks for suggesting it though.

Efficiency and performance are heavily correlated in portable devices. You only have a certain TDP that you can utilize before the device throttles due to a lack of heat dissipation. The more efficient a CPU you have, the more you can accomplish before you hit temps that will affect performance.

Remember, most people don't care as much as you or I. If they're going to buy a laptop to do taxes or web browsing or something, they will probably be mentally biased towards an Intel-based chip. Because it's been marketed for so long, AMD comparatively seems like a super new brand.

If they don't buy a Mac, they'll be biased to whatever BestBuy sells them.

>That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t been paying attention for the last ten years, and don’t ask anyone who has.

Evidently, that leaves Intel the majority of the market.

I work in video games and I think it is still sometimes a problem to use computers that are not based on x86 processors, both in the tool chains and software /engines. People here say that Intel has lost out on consoles and laptops, but in gaming that is because of x86 compatible AMD chips. Apple laptops were good for gaming when they had x86 and could duel boot. I see bugs people report on games made for Macs with x86 that don't work quite right with an Mx chip (though not a huge number).

A friend who worked in film post production was telling me about similar rare but annoying problems with Mx Apple computers. I feel like their are verticals where people will favor x86 chips for a while yet.

I am not as close to this as I was when I actually programmed games (oh so long ago!) so I wonder if this is just the point of view of a person who has lost touch with trends in tech.

That's because the GPU is very different on a Mac. The x86 emulation is perfect.

People miss this. A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD, not just out of brand loyalty, but because of the software and hardware features Intel deploys that are catered to the business market.

Intel’s board is (or should be!) in exactly the right position to assess whether this dam is springing leaks. (It is.)

This is in large part an OEM issue. Dell or HP will definitely have an Intel version of the machine you are looking for, but AMD versions are hit and miss.

I think this is partly because big OEMs doubt (used to doubt?) AMD’s ability to consistently deliver product in the kind of volume they need. Partly it’s because of Intel’s historically anticompetitive business practices.

Hasn't changed, there was an article back in September saying that the relationship between AMD and laptop OEMs is rocky:

> Multiple reports, citing sources at laptop OEMs, have covered what is said to be poor support, chip supply, and communication from AMD with its laptop partners, leading to generally poor execution. Chip consultancy firm AC Analysis says AMD's shift of focus to AI and data centers has led to a "'Cold War ice age' in relationships with OEMs," leading to a loss of trust from its partners.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amds-laptop-oems-...

>A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD

That's because Intel bribed OEMs to use only Intel chips

Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

> And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

IIRC their data center CPU revenue was about even this quarter so this is a bit deceptive (i.e. you can buy 1 large CPU instead of several cheaper ones).

Market share is often measured in install base.

Of a market that is dying between two growing at the edges. Mobile and server clear trump personal compute. This the markets devaluing intel.

To be fair it's not like there is that much profits in mobile either. ARM CPUs are almost a commodity and the margins aren't that great.

Sure, but if the point is showing how Intel isn't really in such a bad spot as one might think just looking at the install base would be pretty deceiving and semi-meaningless.

Those two terms are related but definitely are never interchangeable. Market share is the portion of new sales a company is getting. Install base is the portion of existing in-use products that were from that company. Install base is essentially market share integrated over time, less systems that are discarded or otherwise taken out of service. If market share never changes, install base will approach the same proportions but it's a lagging indicator.

From https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-desktop...

"When it comes to servers, AMD's share totaled 24.2%"

and

"Intel, of course, retained its volume lead with a 75.8% unit market share."

I think data center revenue was in AMD's favor because AMD is second (obviously far behind NVidia) and Intel is third in AI accelerators, which both companies include in their data center numbers. So that pushes things in AMD's favor. I think on data center CPU's alone Intel is still ahead.

Data center revenue is not just CPU. It includes MI300 et al. So that's why data center revenue can be roughly equivalent between AMD & Intel while CPU revenue is still predominantly Intel.

For PC’s that can’t be right. For overall consumer, Windows is at 25.75%, Linux is 1.43% and MacOS is at 5.53%.

Ignoring ChromeOS, and assuming 100% of windows and linux is x86 (decreasingly true - the only win11 I’ve ever seen is an arm VM on my mac) and 100% of Mac is arm (it will be moving forward), that puts arm at 20% of the PC market.

Interpolation from your numbers puts intel at 64% (with a ceiling of 80% of PC; 25% of consumer computing devices unless windows makes a comeback).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

There is a common usage of “PC” that excludes Macs, Chromebooks, and the like. It means the x86-based PC platform descendant from IBM PC compatibles, with BIOS and all.

Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

Windows:

Intel: 64.23%

AMD: 35.71%

Linux:

Intel: 30.15%

AMD: 69.85%

Why do you think gaming community survey would be more relevant than Intel/AMD earning reports in which they unambiguously, for the most part, lay out the earnings per CPU type?

I dunno, I've seen more and more people referencing the crash bugs in the latest gens and how Intel lied about it through their teeth. And Intel having lost to Apple on the CPU front, never having caught up to Nvidia on the GPU front, and basically just not doing anything for the last decade certainly hasn't helped their reputation.

Let them die. Maybe we'd actually see some new competition?

I doubt many people are making purchasing decisions based on Intel branding. Any kind of speed advantage has not been a dominant factor in the minds of most low information/brand influenceable consumers who are buying x86 machines. Everybody else looks at reviews and benchmarks where Intel has to show up with a good product and their branding doesn't get them much.

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