What I think many people around here fail to realize it
just how untypical most of us are. Of all PCs in use,
what percentage were built by the owner? I'll bet
it's less than 1%. Well over 80% of all PCs sold are
built by big corporations, with small companies and
mon-n-pop stores taking most of the rest. I read somewhere
that over 75% of systems never have their covers removed
once they leave the factory.
The battle for the CPU dollar isn't won or lost on some
Quake FPS chart on the internet, it's won in the corporate
meeting rooms. AMD has made great strides, and forced
Intel to react. The next step is to get some solid cheap
chipsets out for the Duron, so you can build a Duron-based
entry-level system for the same price as a Celeron-system.
They're very close, if not there already. You're starting
to see Duron systems on the front pages of the Sunday ads.
The next step is to have some of the biggies, like Compaq,
Dell, or IBM, but AMD chips in their flagship, top-of-the-line
desktops. I don't see much of this yet. AMD also needs to
get some multiprocessor chipsets out there, so they can play
at the high end of the server world. Finally, and the new
Duron may be the ticket, AMD needs to get a lot more market
share for the laptop market. Intel dominates here, and
there is better margin than desktops.
AMD is definitely the choice of the home-built, overclocking,
game-players(like me
). But that win means next to
nothing in the battle for the big bucks.
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