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.
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Intel's CEO Bob Swan is looking beyond CPU market share:
"We think about having 30% share in a $230 billion [silicon] TAM[*] that we think is going to grow to $300 billion [silicon] TAM over the next 4 years, and frankly, I'm trying to destroy the thinking about having 90% share inside our company because, I think it limits our thinking, I think we miss technology transitions. we miss opportunities because we're, in some ways pre-occupied with protecting 90, instead of seeing a much bigger market with much more innovation going on, both Inside our four walls, and outside our four walls, so we come to work in the morning with a 30% share, with every expectation over the next several years, that we will play a larger and larger role in our customers success, and that doesn't just [mean] CPUs.
It means GPUs, it means Al, it does mean FPGAs, it means bringing these -technologies together so we're solving customers' problems. So, we're looking at a company with roughly 30% share in a $288 billion silicon TAM, not CPU TAM but silicon TAM. We look at the investments we've been making over the last several years in these kind of key technology inflections: 5G At autonomous, acquisitions, including Altera, that we think is more and more relevant both in the cloud but also ai the network and at the edge, and we see a much bigger opportunity, and our expectations are that we're going to gain our fair share at that much larger TAM by Investing in these key technology inflections." - Intel CEO Bob Swan
A 30% TAM in all of silicon would mean that Intel not only has more room to grow but is a lot more diversified as well. With the company working on the Nervana processor as well as its Xe GPU efforts, it seems poised to start clawing market share in new markets. Interestingly, it also means that Intel is not interested in defending its older title of being the CPU champion and will actually cede space to AMD where required. To me, this move is reminiscent of Lisa Su's decision to cede space in the GPU side of things to turn AMD around.
Intel's business strategy is now focused on whatever an "XPU" is as well as GPUs, FPGAs, machine learning accelerators, and next-generation memory/storage:
This means the company intends to continue making its heaviest bets in areas such as Optane storage, hardware Artificial Intelligence acceleration, 5G modems, data center networking, and more. The slide that really drives this commitment home comes from Q2's investor meeting that explicitly shows the company moving from a "protect and defend" strategy to a growth strategy. If this slide were in a sales meeting, it wouldn't say much—but delivered to the company's investors, it gains a bit of gravitas.
Most of this was revealed nearly six months ago at the company's May 2019 investor's meeting, but the Q3 investor's meeting last week continues with and strengthens this story for Intel's future growth, with slides more focused on Optane, network, and IoT/Edge market growth than with the traditional PC and server market.
[*] TAM = Total Addressable Market.
Related: Intel Promises "10nm" Chips by the End of 2019, and More
Intel's Interim CEO Robert Swan Becomes Full-Time CEO
AMD Gains Market Share in Desktops, Laptops, and Servers as of Q4 2018
PC Market Decline Blamed on Intel, AMD to See Gains
Intel Chip Shortages - at Least Another Quarter or Two to Go, Say PC Execs
Intel announces $20 billion increase in stock buybacks (from $4.5 billion)
Intel Xe High Performance Computing GPUs will use Chiplets
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Acabatag on Sunday April 14 2019, @05:44AM (2 children)
Everybody is 'refusing to buy upgrades'? What for? To run what new and improved software?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 14 2019, @06:07AM
There is always a new and improved antivirus available to waste your resources.
(Score: 2, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday April 14 2019, @08:11PM
I hear that the new Microsoft cyber, known as Edge is absolutely magnificent. They made it with the very darkest Google cyber -- something nobody thought would ever happen. It happened, very successfully. And I think it's going to mean a lot of jobs in our cyber industry. Computer and everything else. Because when Microsoft comes out with new cyber, everyone buys new digital to put it on. Big boom in the digital. And our digital manufacturers are ready for that. They solved the Meltdown, they solved the Spectre. Big problems from before I took office, now they're history. And our economy is ROARING. MAGA!!!
(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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday April 14 2019, @07:50AM (1 child)
Judging from past predictions [soylentnews.org], when Gartner predicts your success you can rest assured you're headed towards an unmitigated disaster.
Sad :(
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @10:24AM
But what does Netcraft confirm?
Wintel has long been dead to me, for ethical, business, and religious reasons. Never again will I trust what is inside, or believe someone who asks where I want to go today!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @11:17AM
I just replaced my system from 2011, but I bought it this month so it won't show up in sales stats until the next quarterly report.
It's faster and has an SSD, which is nice, but it can't seem to improve the quality of posts from some of the SN regulars. I guess it wasn't my old computer's fault after all. Now I feel bad about giving it the Office Space printer send off.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday April 14 2019, @12:42PM
https://soylentnews.org/~RandomFactor/journal/4151 [soylentnews.org]
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(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]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @01:30AM (2 children)
Phones and Chromebooks. They are killing the expensive, clunky PC.
Microsoft has only itself to blame.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 15 2019, @03:21PM (1 child)
A Phone is used for calling people. What you're talking about is a "smart phone" also known as a tracking device. A Chromebook is quite literally a dumbed down PC. https://imgflip.com/i/29o1n7 [imgflip.com] You don't have a network connection, most of your apps don't work. Quite literally everything you do, can be, and probably is snooped on in some fashion by Google. Not so much different than Windows 10, but hey, at least your Windows 10 PC works just fine without an internet connection after initial setup. You will not be able to use Optical Disc Drives with your chrome book. Games, will not work. Ok, sure, those Facebook, HTML/Flash games probably work, and at which point I highly recommend you get a Chromebook. Since, you're probably their target audience.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @03:26PM
I found a song you might enjoy playing on your PC after you get JACK, or ALSSA, or OSS, or whatever we are supposed to use now, working.
Oh sorry, it's a video, you may have to install a non-free codec on your system, depending on your distribution:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw [youtube.com]
(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.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 15 2019, @03:28PM
Intel is like Ray-Ban. Does it really need to cost that much? No. They just charge you that much, because they can.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"