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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spinportal - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
It's not ironic or a surprise to see ATI or Nvidia pushing chipsets without integrated graphics solution since it will cannabalize their wonderful Turbo PCIe cards! When was the last time Intel's i/g tech or Via's S3 tech on an add-on board could compare or compete to any ATI or Nvidia offerings? It's basic hubris - you want 3D? you buy our cards at additional cost. No free lunch for you!redhatlinux - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
Oooops that's FABredhatlinux - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
Great Article, couldn' expect anything less from the boss. Back in the days AMD produced their own chipset, but as so well put, $ talks. AmD MUST focus their R&D $ on the best possible Retun on Investment, its that simple. BTW I have a buddy, BRIAN who worked at the Austin FAM plant over 4 years ago, These so called 'new cores' were in R@D back then. SOI and 69nm gates as well. Brian still uses a Tyan mobo with 2 MP's. Still pretty smokin rig.Eric
Nayr - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
Thanks #33 for pointing that out.+1 Nerd power.
=P
Viditor - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
"This is, of course, why DDR2 is becomming popular for mobile computing where thermal dissipation is more important than performance"True...both heat and power are lower with DDR2, which will make it an excellent choice for mobile.
Both AMD and Intel will be going DDR2 at the start of 2006...
2cpuminimum - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
What seemed odd was "Being able to run at much higher frequencies than DDR1 is the major advantage that DDR2 offers." when the greatest advantage supposedly held by DDR2 is lower heat production due to a slower core speed. Higher frequency isn't really much of an advantage when that frequency isn't high enough to compensate for higher latency. This is, of course, why DDR2 is becomming popular for mobile computing where thermal dissipation is more important than performance.Viditor - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
Well let's see...Porkster is trying to use a stress test that wasn't benchmarked for multiple apps as a rationale for a supposed Intel superiority in multitasking...sigh.1. Has anyone done any tests that were designed for this? Well gee whiz I guess they have...
http://tinyurl.com/chck7
http://tinyurl.com/akueq
http://tinyurl.com/7agle
The results were that the X2 was vastly superior in 2 threads with heavy workloads, and that with 4 threads of heavy workload the P4EE 840 pulled equal (not better) because HT gives it superior load balancing. Of course in single threads the X2 was again vastly superior (in fact the 840EE proved slower than some other P4 chips...)
2. What about the actual purpose of Tom's test...which platform handles stress better?
Well, on the face of it the X2 was the hands down winner without contestation!
The Intel system kept crashing (5 times IIRC), then they restarted after changing from the Intel Nforce platform to the pure Intel system. After that the Intel platform had to be rebooted 3 times...
The AMD platform just kept running the whole time!
That said, Tom's test doesn't show anything worthwhile...
1. The test methods are extremely flawed. To show stability of a platform, using 1 or 2 systems isn't scientific...it's just sensationalist.
2. Many mistakes were made both in the performance and the design of the test..
As to porkster's (dubbed by many forums as the greatest Troll who ever lived!) assertion of AMD being driven by the "teenager" market, I must say that I'm glad to see so many major corporations hiring teenagers to head up their IT departments! :-)
4lpha0ne - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
@porkster:I'm sure, you'd also call Pentium Ds lemons, because they are also only able to run 2 threads at once. Everything else is a matter of priority settings (like low DivX encoding priority) and hyperthreading, which doesn't distinguish between low and high priority tasks.
4lpha0ne - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
BTW, AMD already has a graphics core (in Geode). And I read, that a part (50 people or so) of the National Semiconductor team, which they took over, was already working on a 3D core.So this would make sense.
porkster - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
If you see the poor multitasking performance of the AMD X2 then you can expect the market share to drop big time, but are AMD users smart enough to avoid bad chips like the X2.AMD is riding the teenager market with a theme of join the club or feel out of it. It's peer group pressure into buying into poor hardware/old tech.
Just check out THG review of the AMD X2 and you wont want one of those lemons.
http://www.tomshardware.com/stresstest/load.html
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