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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @07:37AM (1 child)
But why upgrade? I don't really see the reason outside purely gaming and computational (e.g. simulation) machines. And in gaming it's video that counts, and CPU can be even mid-range. In computation, usually the machine is purely offline, exposed only to local internal network so all "security"-related upgrades are postponed.
The newest computer I bought was Intel D430 - a 11-year-old machine. This works as my work machine. I also use an older one with dual-core Turion.
I like to look at CPU and chipset information. While with Turion even many parts not included could be figured out, in Core 2 something strange started to appear: More and more information just started not to be there. It was impossible to find it in other processor or chipset-related documents nor figure out from the information available. Why chipset needs some signals which should not be there? Why CPU does something with timings? Why power requirements may not add up? (the last one requires LOTS of calculation, I recommend finding a free few hours before you start).
At work, I got a Core i7 to run computations on, and I purchased a UMPC with Atom. I also analyzed documentation and - even more problems, more lacking information.
I have not analyzed AMD's documentation, but from Intel it looks like CPU companies wants to extend its monopoly not only on chipsets, but also on adapters and boards, stealing another good from users: PC's expandability. We now use PCs, not Amigas or Z80-machines, because every company could manufacture a board for the PC, you bought it, configured its space in memory and it was working well.
And it looks like they start to take this from us too. I think the common explanation for it will be "because security" or "because terrorism".
P.S. Software configurations for these machines for smooth working: Debian Linux, components installed from scratch, TDE as I like configurability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @03:29PM
The heydey of building your own PC to suit you is as gone as the bolt-on ricer kits and car stereo upgrade kits from years past.