Press Release: AMD’s presence in workstations plummets in Q1’07, reports Jon Peddie Research

It's a bit late to post this, but still very interesting newbits. Over at JPR, they have a table that shows the MSS of Intel vs AMD head-to-head. In Q3'05, AMD is steadily gaining MSS at this segment, from 6.6% to 13.3% on Q2'06. But on Q1'07, AMD's MSS is reduced to 8% and Intel enjoys 92% of the MSS. Expand to read the full story..

EDITOR'S NOTE: Excerpts from the JPR Workstation Report and expert interviews are available on request.

AMD’s presence in workstations plummets in Q1’07, reports Jon Peddie Research
TIBURON, Calif—June 13, 2007—Times change, and they can change fast. As 2006 began, Intel’s Xeon was in a tailspin, while AMD’s Opteron could do no wrong. In the robust market for workstations, the roles have since reversed, with first quarter results reported from Jon Peddie Research showing Xeon has grabbed back much of the share it had lost to Opteron.

The workstation market remains strong
Overall, the workstation market continues to pleasantly surprise. As expected, quarterly growth rates have subsided a bit from the 25% to 35% increases (year-to-year) JPR had seen in late ’05 and early ’06, but they remain strong. All told, the industry shipped 674 thousand workstatioßns in the first quarter of 2007, up 15.2% over the same quarter of 2006. ASPs held flat, allowing revenue to also increase a healthy 15% to around $1.7 billion.

Intel stealing back the share it had lost
In workstations, Opteron had been steadily draining share from Intel’s Xeon, peaking at over 13% of dual-socket platforms for Windows-compatible workstations in Q2’06. But Q2’06 not only market the peak of Opteron’s incursion, it marked the beginning of a significant fall. JPR reports that in Q1’07, AMD’s share of the dual-socket capable segment (where Opteron was strongest) didn’t simply flattten but actually dropped by over 50% year-to-year.

Vendor
Q3CY05
Q4CY05
Q1CY06
Q2CY06
Q3CY06
Q4CY06
Q1CY07

Xeon
93.4%
90.9%
87.6%
86.7%
89.1%
88.9%
92.0%

Opteron
6.6%
9.1%
12.4%
13.3%
10.9%
11.1%
8.0%


Table 1. Xeon vs. Opteron in market for dual-socket, Windows-compatible workstations

“We’d expected AMD’s share to moderate or level off by the time Intel improved its dual-socket Xeon platform in mid ’06, but we hadn’t anticipated the decline we’ve seen,” commented analyst and JPR Workstation Report author Alex Herrera. “The extent of Intel’s rebound will put that much more pressure on AMD to deliver quad-core Barcelona soonand with better performance than Xeon.”

In the overall workstation market (including higher-volume single-socket systems), AMD had risen to a peak of 3.6% in Q2’06, contracting to 2.0% in this last quarter.

About the JPR Workstation Report
Now in its fourth year, JPR’s Workstation Report - Professional Computing Markets and Technologies has established itself as the essential reference guide for hardware and software vendors and suppliers serving the workstation and professional graphics markets.

Subscribers to the JPR Workstation Report receive two in-depth reports per year providing a comprehensive analysis of the vendors and technologies driving the workstation platform. Clients also receive four quarterly reports detailing and analyzing market results for each calendar quarter. For information about purchasing the JPR Workstation Report, please call 415/435-9368 or visit Jon Peddie Research at http://www.jonpeddie.com.

About Jon Peddie Research
Dr. Jon Peddie has been active in the graphics and multimedia fields for more than 30 years. Jon Peddie Research is a technically oriented multimedia and graphics research and consulting firm. Based in Tiburon, California, JPR provides consulting, research, and other specialized services to technology companies, including graphics development, multimedia for professional applications and consumer electronics, high-end computing, and Internet-access product development. Jon Peddie's Market Watch and First Look are quarterly reports focused on the market activity of PC graphics controllers for mobile and desktop computing.

Source:AMD’s presence in workstations plummets in Q1’07, reports Jon Peddie Research

Tech Link (Industry): AMD Opteron CPUs hit by heat stroke

Duh, so much about quality control. This is another nuts in the work, what a great way to screw your customers.

Exclusive AMD today admitted it has inadvertently allowed a number of 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz single-core Opteron x52 and x54 processors that could corrupt data under extreme conditions to escape into the wild.

It is believed that the glitch is triggered when the affected chip's FPU is made to loop through a series of memory-fetch, multiplication and addition operations without any condition checks on the result of the calculations. The loop has to run over and over again for long enough to cause localised heating which together with high ambient temperatures could combine to cause the result of the operation to be recorded incorrectly, leading to data corruption.
SPONSORED LINKS

Over 475 courses, exams, certificates and resources available now

At Rackspace We're built to handle highly-customised hosting environments - Click Here

UK IT recruitment specialists - Jobsite

IT gurus seek Your counsel - Jobsite, The best people for the job

To trigger the effect, the loop has to be run millions of time, an AMD customer source told Reg Hardware, potentially for hours at a time with no other operations being introduced during the run.

According to the source - who claimed to be party to emails highlighting the issue and sent by AMD to a number of the chip maker's major customers and partners - AMD has investigated the problem and found it was only able to reproduce the bug's effects in a synthetic benchmark test.

The problem is believed to affect only a fraction - perhaps no more than 3,000 individual CPUs - which managed to slip through AMD's screening net. It is not known how this so-called 'test escape' ocurred, but it took place "in part of 2005 and early 2006", an AMD spokesman said.

AMD said it has introduced another screening test to catch any further affected parts. Chips caught in this test in future will be re-rated at a lower clock speed to prevent the problem. The company is also working with OEMs to identify affected parts and contact customers who could be affected - if they are, they will be offered free replacements.

AMD stressed the problem was due to "a convergence of three specific simultaneous conditions", not a fault with the Opteron architecture. The company claimed the issue had not been observed on systems running commercially available applications.

"It's very hard to imagine this type of [tight FP loop] code in our [financial services] environment," Reg Hardware's source said. "The only thing I could think that would be coded this way would be some type of strange cipher code. For example, any type of 'for' loop that uses a compare operation would not have the problem." ®

Source:RegHardware