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Strong corporate desktop sales limit the decline of the PC market
Gartner and IDC have both published their quarterly reports on the size of the PC market in the first quarter of 2019, and they've both agreed: about 58.5 million systems were shipped.
[...] Both Gartner and IDC say that there's continued influence from the shortage of Intel processors, caused by the company's long-delayed transition to 10nm manufacturing. That situation leaves Intel's 14nm manufacturing facilities overburdened. Gartner analysts said that these concerns disrupted the growth seen in the second quarter last year, as the delays prompted Intel to focus on higher margin products, with PC vendors following suit. IDC similarly cited the shortage of Intel chips at the low end as partly to blame for the market decline. To the extent that low-end chips were available, the PC companies seem to be favoring putting them in Chromebooks rather than Windows machines.
Both firms also say that smaller PC vendors were more affected than larger ones, suggesting that Intel is giving priority to its biggest customers.
Countering this effect somewhat was stronger than expected commercial desktop sales, as companies continue their Windows 10 refresh cycle. However, Gartner's analysts feel that this may have peaked. Going forward, greater adoption of AMD's processors is expected to reduce the impact of supply constraints.
Major OEMs "sourcing alternative CPUs from AMD" to counter Intel slump
"The supply constraints affected the vendor competitive landscape as leading vendors had better allocation of chips and also began sourcing alternative CPUs from AMD," Mikako Kitagawa, senior analyst at Gartner says. "The top three vendors worldwide were still able to increase shipments despite the supply constraint by focusing on their high-end products and taking share from small vendors that struggled to secure CPUs."
[...] China is reportedly sick and tired of PCs at this point, and Latin America experienced a huge 16.6% decline in PC shipments during the period reportedly due to political and economic instability. Only Japan is said to have experienced any growth in the market at all, with everyone else refusing to upgrade old systems.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @06:51AM (4 children)
until amd drivers and native linux games available make for a decent X11 experience. In the mean time intel can keep "transitioning" to a less fucked up microarchitecture
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 14 2019, @08:31AM (3 children)
I've been running AMD exclusively for at least 20 years. I took a strong dislike to Intel long ago, for various reasons, and I don't run their hardware. Linux has the drivers for just about everything. In fact, Linux nVidia drivers are competitive with the proprietary driver downloaded from nVidia's own site. I'm sure that you can still find hardware that isn't supported by Linux, but those special purpose devices aren't in common use by Joe and Jane Sixpack and their little packlets. Those devices with zero Linux support are intentionally kept that way by the proprietors, not by the Linux community.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:17PM (2 children)
so you don't really play on linux and like to talk about you personal experience. ok
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:30PM (1 child)
Gaming. What is the most important driver, for gamers? Video, right? Unless you object strongly to binary blobs supplied by vendors, use the binary blob. It works. If you do object, the open source is competitive with the binary blob.
Complaints about drivers on Linux are mostly outdated. Twenty years ago, people commonly struggled to make hardware work on Linux. Today, those complaints are mostly FUD.
No, I'm not a gamer, but it's easy to see that the most common problem with gaming on Linux, is that developers can't be assed to bother with Linux support. Complain about proper support all you like, but don't complain about drivers, when you have a choice between adequate and good drivers.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday April 15 2019, @05:18PM
This is true for AMD, but the NVidia driver situation still sucks for Linux. I have some games that specifically require one driver or the other...can't remember which one fails with the open drivers (been a few months since I gave up on trying to game on that laptop...probably something in Steam), but I know Wine usually throws a bunch of errors and fails if you try running games though Wine on the proprietary drivers.
My main gaming rig and media center PC runs all AMD though, and I've never had a driver issue with that system. It's just NVidia that sucks.