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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: 2) by srobert on Sunday April 14 2019, @06:00PM (3 children)
There's an 11 year old laptop at my house that my wife uses to pick up email, browse the web, youtube, run some spreadsheets, etc. It also serves as our print server. I asked her if we should get a new one and she said "No, What for? It's working fine." It's running FreeBSD 12.0 and is more useable than the Windows 10 machine I have to use at my work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday April 15 2019, @01:03AM (2 children)
The hypebeasts on YouTube seem to think that Intel and AMD will start using software that can automatically run single-threaded code in multiple threads/cores. This would actually allow you to lower the clock speed and still get better performance. Might be seen within the next 3-5 years.
That and some other features might be worth it to upgrade, maybe at the 15 year mark for you.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @03:25AM (1 child)
Sadly, the gains from splitting code like that isn't as great as they will have you believe. Sure the synthetic benchmarks make it look awesome, but real programs aren't really made to be split up like that. This is even more so if they want to do it "magically," rather than doing introspection or scanning the binary in advance. Not to mention the headaches that come along when the program attempts to do something remotely complicated causing spinlocks. In reality, only certain system calls on a whitelist will end up being threaded like that when the program ignores the return value.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday April 15 2019, @04:09AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW_h4KFr9js [youtube.com]
Here's what I'm talking about. 8 minutes in.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]