San Diego (CA) - AMD scored a major win against Intel during the back-to-school season. According to Current Analysis, AMD outsold Intel for the very first time in US retail over the period of a whole month. More than half of all computer systems US stores sold during September carried an AMD processor.

Aside its usual legal, marketing and PR battles against Intel, AMD surprised analysts with a unexpectedly strong performance in US retail. Tony Duboise, analyst with Current Analysis, said that the company was able to sometimes surpass Intel's US retail sales in some weeks in the past, but the fact that it kept the lead over a whole month is unprecedented.

Duboise explained that AMD used a retail strategy that in the end worked out well: "This is a perfect example of being at the right place at the right time," she said. "AMD's sizeable win in September can be attributed to a myriad of factors, one of the most impressive was being able to capitalize on the success of the most popular Media Center PC and find the consumer's 'sweet spot' on multiple product and pricing levels." AMD's overall US retail market share reached 52 percent in September. Compared to Intel, AMD had placed its processors into "the right configurations," which offered consumers superior price-performance combinations. "They had some important design wins and were able to partner with the right OEM's, Duboise said. Such design wins especially included Media Center PCs, which are gaining popularity quickly. In September, Media Center PCs accounted for 46 percent of all US retail desktop sales. Of those sales, 55 percent included an AMD-based processor, according to Duboise.

One of the contributing reasons to increasing Media Center PC sales is the decreasing price of such systems. While the average Media PC sold for $1261 in September 2004, the average price this year was $787 - with some systems reaching as low as $599, Duboise said. The star system of the Media Center movement and AMD's success was the HP Pavilion a1130n. Running Microsoft's Media Center OS and offering a 64-bit AMD Athlon 64 processor and 1 GByte of RAM for a post-rebate price of $679. The a1130n has become the best selling Media Center PC in retail to date, according to Current Analysis.

While AMD's strategy has worked out, there are questions why Intel's hasn't. Some may argue that the recently reported chipset shortages impacted Intel's ability to ship enough systems into retail. Duboise however believes that such shortage may have had just a minor or even no impact on back-to-school sales. According to her, retail systems have a 13-week lifecycle and most of the back-to-school system deals may have been reached before the initial chipset shortages occurred.

Crazy eh? I'm sure they're only refering to consumer desktop processors (ie. Sempron + AthlonXP + Athlon64) rather than notebooks or server products, because intel absolutley kills AMD in notebooks. Probably more than 5-1. It would be much worse for AMD if you were to compare Pentium M (centrino) sales vs. Turion/MobileAthlon64 sales.

I'm sure they're only refering to consumer desktop processors

They probably also ignore Dell-type purchases which make up a bulk of Intel's profit. So yes, this is just a carefully created statistic that ignores most of the facts.

I'm an AMD fanboy, but I'm not fan of these misleading figures.

They are talking about OEM's there, and media centre pc's which are all by OEM's... they have to be including that...

AMD for lyfe!

OHNOS THE INSTABILITY AND HEAT ISSUSE!SAED>S>>@>

lol, you'd be amazed by how well Intel market to computer illiterate PC buyers. Its as if Intel had somehow found a way to brainwash them into thinking that AMD processors are unstable, and that despite the fact Intel processors are only occasionally faster than an amd, they will stick to the fact that AMD processors "run hot".

Thats if they have ever heard of AMD, but most have.

I've had AMD since my old K6-2 400Mhz, never looked back

I use and recommend AMD. Their desktop CPU's are currently much better than P4's.

I'm currently putting together my new box using an Opteron 144 ;)

However, I would recommend Intel for laptops.

I was always a AMD fanboi, but last upgrade I went to a northwood, now I can't wait to go back to AMD :\ And it seems most of the heat problems are in Intel's camp now anyway, hah.

Turions are really not bad at all in laptops, however they're very scarce... I know the Acer Ferarri laptops have them, and there is a compaq that has one as well, but other than that, I dont know of any...

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,122758,00.asp

If you're looking for an inexpensive Media Center PC that can easily manage your music, photos, and other multimedia, HP's Pavilion a1130n Desktop PC is a good choice. Unlike more expensive systems that run the Windows XP Media Center Edition OS, the Pavilion a1130n has no TV tuner or remote control, but it does a fine job of handling other multimedia tasks at a very reasonable $1060.

wow people will buy anything. how is that a Media Centre other than the cheap oem copy of MCE 2005 they threw in the box? 'got marketing scam?

^^ buy an xbox!!

AMD FTW

I`m an AMD Fanboy. Will never go back to an Intel. Convinced my bro to go AMD as well, He only bought it because it was cheaper. But now he has never looked back and regretted it....


In japan though. Most families have intel. They have got no idea what AMD is. And they only care about how many gightz it has. Not about whats better for money, which are better than others. Their stupidity irrates me.

now is is some good news, AMD are in a much better position than i ever realised.

About to put together an AMD box for myself, got an ASUS A8N SLI board which i'll be putting to good use. This is my second AMD setup since the duron days. Thought i'd give AMD a whirl and see how it performs against my current p4 setup.

I've moved to AMD from Intel after being a staunch intel supported for a few years. The main reason I switched over was that my old P4 was just totally broken and kept hardlocking and I couldn't fix it. I decided on an AMD more to give it a chance than anything else.

I've been pretty impressed with it so far, haven't really had any problems. I don't think it was as good as my P4 in terms of multitasking, which I guess might be due to hyperthreading, if you can believe the Intel hype.

Server side, I've grown sick of the slack performance of Xeons, especially with modern CPU slawing games like BF2. Everyone is reporting the new dual core Opterons smoke Xeons all over the place.

Well, they did publicly challenge Intel to a live, televised, "set of benchmarks" between the Xeon and the Operon x2.

Their claim is that they designed the Opteron and the Athlon64 for dual core, because "they knew" it would be the next big thing.

Reports were that at least for Pentium D's, it was very much a rush job, not anywhere near as "combined" as the a64.