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.