AMD Grabs over 30% CPU Market Share as Intel Continues to Decline
This is good for competition sake, that's for sure. But the PC market will continue to suffer under these missed opportunities:<p>- DRAM price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 4x more memory or more for the price we pay these days<p>- SSD price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 2x more SSD capacity per cost<p>- ARM in PC is still being foot-dragged. I have no faith that Intel can make an M1/M2 competitor or killer, but AMD, Samsung, and Qualcomm should be able to do it. I mean, Amazon/Aws have their own ARM chips.<p>- compact low power PCs like raspberry-pi type form factors (or the PC stick, or similar) are ripe for the taking. I have tower case PCs from 5-10 years ago that should be replaceable with a 3"x3" cube design, or imagine a base power supply where you take some sort of FrameworkPC-style headless notebook blades and they sit vertically on the base. The ports all face you. If it was a great multiple-4k display super-KVM, heck yes.<p>- AMD, Qualcomm, and Samsung should be pushing a linux desktop initiative. Microsoft and Windows are really holding back PC units with their awful OS releases. The disaster of Windows 8 has not really been fixed, and they frankly don't care. A better-than-OSX linux is out there and it is low hanging fruit.<p>The PC market is so ripe for major innovation. It is stuck with crappy motherboard and case form factors.<p>Intel has ALWAYS sucked at platform leadership. AMD (and/or Samsung and/or Qualcomm) don't have to be. I really hope if AMD hits 50% at some point they can push more platforms to create new markets and segments for their processors and graphics chips. Intel is beyond saving, they have never understood platforms, software, and their management is moribund in penny pinching and monopoly rent extraction.<p>Apple still treats the PC market as an afterthought. They have the moxie and hardware/software to do something, but they aren't open enough.<p>Qualcomm might simply be too OEM-focused to show this kind of leadership, and they'd need a major ARM PC CPU, and that is five years off.<p>Samsung is too samsung ecosystem focused. They are not open enough.<p>AMD is, for better or worse, the one with the market position and innovation ability to create new PC opportunities. They don't have the subservient history to Microsoft. They have more EU/world focus, and those markets should be interested/open to non-Microsoft computing.<p>And that is the path to long term market relevance. Intel may still come back, and they have pseudomonopoly powers and relationships with big business to relegate AMD. AMD needs to continue execution in x86, but do what I described: ARM/Apple M1/M2 competitor, Linux/Steamdeck desktop OS initiatives, and push more revolutionary small form factor computing platforms. It will hedge against Intel's monopoly powers and open new markets that Intel has shown utter inability to compete in historically.<p>And frankly, with the "Moores Law" family of macro-trends stalling more and more, the path to more CPU and GPU sales isn't just a faster better chip. It's getting chips into more packages, places, and uses that people currently have them. Form factors and packaging are going to make MORE of a difference for upgrading. Right now, if I could get some sort of fancy framework-style compact notebook-that-is-a-thin-but-upgradable-desktop computer in a neat package, that's a much more compelling buy than a machine that has, what, maybe real world 10% PERCEPTIBLE performance improvement over something from 5 years ago?<p>Realistically this should have been in full swing with the COVID boom. Not sure if the penny pinchers will allow such "radical" investment (the non-ARM initiatives might take, what a billion a year froma 26 billion a year company?)