In the eighties, they had control of more than 90% of the PC chip market,
obviously. That was before they had steady competition from competitors in
the same marketplace. Now that they have gone down to 80% of the market,
after the steady competition came in. It's now a major battle for them to go
over 85% these days.
I seem to remember that AMD actually competing very effectively in the
late 386s days with their 40MHz 386DX chip while Intel was just
starting out with the (at the time) very expensive 486s. And back in
the 286 days there were quite a number of competitors (including AMD
back then).
Intel's peak, from what I can tell, was around mid 1995 through to mid
1997. At that time everyone had pulled out of the x86 market except
Intel, AMD and Cyrix. AMD was floundering around having all kinds of
trouble with the K5 (first it was a year+ late, then under performing
compared to had been when the chip was supposed to be released).
Cyrix was doing ok with their 6x86 line, though compatibility
problems, first with Microsoft disabling cache, then later with
motherboards not supporting 75MHz bus speeds properly, kept this chip
in the real low-end and fairly low quantities.
It was only really when AMD got their K6 production up and running
that they really started competing again.
The majority of the Intel advantage comes from having products that are
competing in markets not covered by the competition -- yet. Especially,
higher margin markets like servers and laptops.
The larger volume also helps a lot. A HUGE amount of the costs
involved in CPUs are tied up in R&D and capital costs. But where the
up front costs are large, the unit costs are relatively small. Any
money made from the first few million CPUs goes to pay off the R&D
costs and it's only later that they start really making profit.
For the servers, it looks like trouble for the two ends of the market that
Intel was targetting for itself: the Xeon and Itanium. The Opteron seems to
truly have the Xeon's number, it does everything that the Xeon does, except
more. When the Xeon CT comes out, it might close the 64-bit gap slightly on
Opteron, but it still loses out to Opteron's other major advantages:
integrated RAM controller, and Hypertransport. These advantages of Opteron
have very little to do with greater performance, but much more to do with
greater simplicity in developing systems around them.
I'd say that it's a bit of both there, particularly if you look at
4-way servers. The Opteron seems to smack totally smack the XeonMP
around any time you start playing with 4P systems. On 2P systems the
shared bandwidth of the Xeon doesn't seem to hurt as much, though the
Opteron does almost always win here as well.
Now in all of these Opteron vs. Xeon battles, you'd think Itanium is safely
tucked away in a higher end of the market, but it isn't, people don't
consider it to be higher end at all, except for its price. It is said that
Xeon is for lower-priced servers while Itanium is for big-iron servers.
However, what features does Itanium have that distinguish it for use in
big-iron than the Xeon, apart from the IA64 language? Itanium and Xeon both
use the same shared bus for their i/o operations, although the Itanium might
get a slightly faster version of the bus; Itanium and Xeon use the same
shared i/o bus to access their memory as well. As a matter of fact, Opteron
is technically more suitable for big-iron than Itanium is.
The glue around the Itanium is currently allowing it to perform a lot
better in very large servers than anything we've seen from the Xeon.
Of course, we haven't really had a chance to see what the Opteron can
really do in large servers since no one has made anything more than a
4P system.
It is a bit of a coup though that AMD has managed to compete VERY well
with the Itanium in a LOT of 2P and 4P benchmarks.
Then we get to the laptop muscle of Intel, which Intel is still currently
strong in. Laptop sales are entirely based around marketing. Last year,
Intel cleaned up with a marketing campaign based around slightly lower power
consumption, and built-in WiFi, known as Centrino. This year, the "latest
thing" may very well be a neat color scheme, and 64-bit chips. Witness how
Acer is marketing the Ferrari notebook: the only thing it's got going for it
seems to be a fluorescent red paint job and a famous namebrand; but people
are absolutely nuts about it. Now Intel might be able to market a Toyota
Itanium notebook, but I doubt it.
Hehe, I'd like to see that Toyota notebook, complete with non-descript
styling and a boring paint job :> Actually a Centrino Toyota notebook
might just work, "sure it doesn't look very exciting, but it's
extremely reliable and gets excellent millage (low power
consumption)".
I think Intel is pretty well positioned in the laptop market for the
time being. AMD/Acer might have a bit of a win on their hands with
the Ferrari notebook, but really Intel has a great base of technology
in their Pentium-M and i855 chipset. AMD does have some options here,
particularly if they can do something with the AthlonXP-M line on a
90nm fab process. If they could combine some of the features of the
Athlon64/Opteron and the very low power consumption of the AthlonXP-M
(that chip is actually in the same basic power range as the
Pentium-M), they could have a decent competitor. I'm just not sure
that AMD has the resources to develop two completely separate cores
like Intel does (err, I guess Intel develops 3 cores).
Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can
follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting
some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more
importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get
the marketing going well, but the opportunity is there. VIA could
potentially start leading a low-cost notebook revolution in much the
same way that the K6 did on the desktop. I'm sure there are a lot of
people who would be willing to sacrifice some performance for a $500
laptop instead of a $1000 one. Intel's Celeron-M seems to be a
non-starter so far (though it's still early), while the Celeron Mobile
consumes a fair chunk of power while offering terrible performance.
ppP