Industry Update - Q2-2005: Chipset wars, AMD's growing market share and more...
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 13, 2005 4:34 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Motherboards
For the most part, motherboards are pretty stagnant these days. The number of individual motherboard manufacturers is dwindling, and many motherboard makers are simply motherboard designers who get their boards manufactured by Foxconn or ECS. Sometimes, you'd be surprised if you knew where your motherboard really came from.Of course, the most interesting motherboards are all Socket-939 and LGA-775 based now; the transition from Socket-754 and Socket-478 is pretty much complete, with the former still being used for entry-level AMD motherboards.
The trend these days is to put as many PCIe x16 slots on your motherboard as possible, regardless of whether or not you can use them for SLI or CrossFire configurations. So we've seen motherboards based on Intel, SiS and VIA chipsets with two PCIe x16 connectors, yet with no real use for the dual slots for now - other than added marketing potential.
As we mentioned in our Computex coverage, the move to the BTX form factor is going extremely slowly. Most manufacturers are expecting to ship less than 10% of their products in a BTX form factor, with the large majority of them forecasting numbers closer to 3%. By the end of 2006, demand is expected to rise a bit, but the most aggressive numbers that we've seen are 30% - 35% (including OEM shipments). The majority of manufacturers are saying that only 15% of their shipments will be BTX motherboards by the end of 2006. The end result is that the BTX transition won't really take place in any appreciable numbers until 2007 or 2008, with BTX being the de-facto standard by 2009.
Memory
Much like the CPU and motherboard markets, the memory market appears to be at a standstill, thanks to it also being in a transitional period. The transition from DDR1 to DDR2 is taking much longer than expected for two reasons: the increased longevity of DDR1 and the slowing CPU market.Being able to run at much higher frequencies than DDR1 is the major advantage that DDR2 offers. But since Intel's FSB is still stuck at 800MHz for the vast majority of processors, Intel platforms don't really need more than a dual channel DDR400 interface, much less DDR2-667. AMD won't transition to DDR2 until Q2 2006, so there won't be any demand from the other side of the fence either until then. With DDR2 not making much sense on Intel platforms and not used on AMD platforms, there's no surprise that the transition to DDR2 is taking a long time.
In fact, it sounds like one of the biggest pushes to DDR2 will be mobile, with Intel's Sonoma platform for Centrino. By the second half of this year, most manufacturers will be ready to transition to DDR2 mobile solutions.
Because of the slow DDR2 adoption, memory and motherboard manufacturers are thinking that it will be one more chipset generation before we see a real shift in memory technology.
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snedzad - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
No, it won't. KT880 chipset is for K7 (socket A) processors. You probably thought about K8T800 chipset, that doesn't support 939 socket. Only K8T800Pro and K8T890 are supporting 939 and none of them dual core. Even a bios update won't help. Via works on revision of the chipset that should allow dual core CPUs.xsilver - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Will the kt880 chipset support dual core? (asus a8v, abit av8 etc...)many of us owners would like to know :)
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Nehemoth - I'm pretty sure that's not an official roadmap. It looks like an educated guess on VR Zone's part as to what's happening based on the analyst meeting from Friday.One thing they missed was the mobile sector. At the meeting, AMD said they were coming out with dual core Turions next year as well...
One other thing I think they might have wrong is the 65nm parts not coming out till 2007, though they didn't list anything for H2 06...
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
"You can go to HP or Compaq and order a Turion laptop right now. So they are out there, just not pushed real hard right now"That's true, but notice that they only have one Turion designed notebook...
This was a very late arrival and it's not very well integrated. You can say there aren't many models because it's not being pushed, or go the other way and say it's not being pushed because there aren't many models...
It is a fact that unless a design is locked in by January, you will have very few models available for that year...
Marlin1975 - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
You can go to HP or Compaq and order a Turion laptop right now. So they are out there, just not pushed real hard right now.knitecrow - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
I love these industry update articlesNehemoth - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
If you go herehttp://www.vr-zone.com/?i=2328&s=1
Are The Manila And Windsor Cores
and see the new AMD roadmap, you can see the new core with integrated graphic..
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
ElMoIsEviL - "marketshare figures taken from Mercury show results that differ greatly from these"Marketshare numbers from Mercury show the previous quarter...
Beenthere - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Industry figures can be twisted to say whatever you want them to say and they are typically 3-6 months behind current sales. With AMD selling more desktop CPUs than Intel over the past several quarters and Mobo production being ahead of sales, you can be pretty certain AMD's sales and market share gains are very real. Even Intel's 10Q's show major drops in CPU sales and Intel is actually BUYING all the sales they are getting. If the shift is from 80/20 to 60/40 or 50/50 it's still a Helleva coup for AMD and the hand writing is on the wall for Intel, who's arrogance got the better of them.As for SLI - it's a technology few need and only enthusiasts will pay thru the nose for. Even if SLI Mobos get down to $100 which they will, you still need two over-priced graphics cards to use SLI. Even power PC users don't need SLI and few consumers will throw good money away like gamers do.
yacoub - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
So is that actually a saying in Taiwan or just creative journalistic license? ;)