Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market
- Reference: 1636748883
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/11/12/apple_arm_m1_intel_x86_market/
- Source link:
The Cupertino-based iMonster provided the boost needed for Arm-compatible chips to take noticeable desktop and laptop processor market share away from x86, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
Arm's market share in PC chips was about eight per cent during Q3 this year, climbing steadily from seven per cent in Q2, and up from only two per cent in Q3 2020, before Arm-compatible M1 Macs went on sale.
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Apple is gradually dropping Intel's processors from Macs in favor of its homegrown Arm-flavored processors. Arm's PC market share growth was mostly powered by strong Macs sales, McCarron confirmed.
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"Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected," McCarron said, adding the Arm share numbers also included shipments of Arm processors in Chromebooks.
Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected
Arm's PC processor market share will continue to expand as consumers upgrade Intel-based Macs to ones with Apple's chips, McCarron said. That market share growth may level off once the Mac upgrade cycle slows down, but that remains to be seen, he added.
Sales of Chromebooks with Arm chips have slowed, and Windows PC users are not switching over to Arm-based laptops with chips from Qualcomm. The numbers reinforce Apple's strength as a silicon design powerhouse. The super-corp has also gone through its fair share of personal computer CPU architectures, notably from 6502 to 68000 to PowerPC to x86, and not only has experience with these transitions but has been designing its own Arm cores for years.
In another corner, Intel is being pecked away at by x86 rival AMD, which has been [4]taking market share away since its Ryzen chips starting appearing in PCs, and Epyc microprocessors in servers, in 2017. Perhaps AMD undersold itself with its [5]Buster Douglas analogy at the launch of its Zen family.
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And in the background to this, there's the ongoing popularity of Arm-powered single-board computers, primarily the Raspberry Pi, potentially providing alternative systems to traditional PCs.
AMD had a 24.6 per cent x86 processor market share – servers, PCs, and games consoles included – in Q3 this year, growing from 22.5 per cent a year ago, according to Mercury. Intel's share declined to 75.4 per cent in Q3, compared to a 77.6 per cent share in the year-ago quarter.
Breaking down Mercury's numbers further, AMD's desktop share went from 20.1 per cent in Q3 2020 down to 17 per cent in Q3 2021, though laptops and other mobile PCs climbed from 20.2 per cent to 22.0 per cent. Servers jumped from 6.6 per cent to 10.2 percent.
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With Ryzen and Epyc parts, AMD measures up to Intel with a full stack of offerings from entry-level personal computers to gaming boxen to servers. Before Ryzen, AMD was mainly competing on the low-end to mid-range with Intel chips such as the Pentium and Core i3.
"It's not so much they are lagging; AMD went from a modestly competitive to a more significant competitive," McCarron said.
Facebook, which wants to be known as [8]Meta , recently [9]announced it would use AMD chips in its data centers to power its latest and greatest microservers.
Intel's newest [10]Alder Lake x86 family , introduced last month, could slow down market-share loss to AMD. Intel's general-purpose processors are also facing competition from accelerators like GPUs, FPGAs, and custom silicon optimized for particular workloads.
[11]AMD reveals an EPYC 50 flaws – 23 of them rated High severity. Intel has 25 problems, too
[12]Chip makers aren't all-in on metaverse hardware yet – we should know, we asked them
[13]AMD tries to spoil Nvidia's week by teasing high-end accelerators, Epyc chips with 3D L3 cache, and more
[14]Intel claims first Alder Lake chip is the fastest desktop gaming silicon in the world
During Q3, the supply-chain crunch led chipmakers to prioritize their more profitable, high-margin processor, and the CPU product mix for PCs leaned toward higher-end systems.
"That pretty much drives processor suppliers to focus on high-end products, like a Core i9 or i7 versus a Celeron," McCarron said.
The focus on high-end processors and a corresponding decline in demand for Chromebooks hurt entry-level PC chips in Q3. Chromebooks were popular in the early days of the pandemic as people sought systems to use wherever they ended up working or studying, and that market demand was satisfied in Q2 this year, McCarron said.
During the Chromebook boom, Intel's Celeron and an AMD non-Zen product code-named Stoney Ridge – the A4-9120C chip – shipped in the millions. It's hard to determine [15]when demand for Chromebooks will return, McCarron said. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/01/amd_2016_annus_horriblis/
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/27/intel_alder_lake/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/amd_and_intel_flaws/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/05/chip_makers_metaverse/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/09/amd_november_launch/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/27/intel_alder_lake/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/13/chroembook_sales_crash/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"Noticeable" is not the same as "statistically significant." :)
Speedbump
I've got shoes that have lasted longer than Apple has stayed on a CPU architecture... Part of it is Apple is a big fan of dropping legacy support and telling their customers to thank them for it. Other manufacturers wouldn't get away with that. Let me know when Dell, HP, Lenovo, or another big name comes out with a non-x86 based PC, as THAT would be big news. Apple switching to the newest shinny is not.
Re: Speedbump
"Let me know when Dell, HP, Lenovo, or another big name comes out with a non-x86 based PC, as THAT would be big news."
Just one? Because all of those places make ARM Chromebooks and some of them have also made some Windows on ARM machines. They're still primarily X86, but they have tried out the idea too.
I guess the 6502/68000 aren't part of iApples's history?
How easily we forget.
Re: I guess the 6502/68000 aren't part of iApples's history?
And PowerPC, an IBM chip.
"Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected," McCarron said . . . .
Apple transitioned on the timeline they've been signaling for over a year. "Anyone" = people who read too many Mac rumor sites before hiding under a rock last year.
"It's not so much [Intel] are lagging; AMD went from a modestly competitive to a more significant competitive," McCarron said.
Intel's product performance is behind or on par with AMD's (depending on the job) and well behind Apple. That's called lagging. Does anyone know what a "significant competitive" [sic] is?
Can we please either not center stories around consultants' drivel or find the unicorn consultant who can use words competently? Thx.
Analysts
We'll have to agree to disagree: we've found Dean to be pretty reliable and there's no hype or over-hype to what he's said.
C.
A single vendor can never achieve this. Yes it has many fans but is tiny in comparison to the hordes of business laptops, business desktops all from a variety of brands.
The closest company to achieving this is Raspberry Pi Foundation. This has monopolized the IoT market. Up to 40% of them sold have entered the industrial market. That is a huge amount.
The devices that sold the most last year were laptops and Chromebooks, Apple market share is puny in anything not named an IPhone, that's why they do half ass the jib with their computers.