by Anton Shilov
10/23/2005 | 04:40 PM
Market research agency Jon Peddie Research (JPR) said in a recent report that the share of Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron microprocessors in workstations has grown significantly in the past 18 months, but the overall share was still 2%, much less compared to the share of Intel Corp.’s Pentium and Xeon processors.
<%BANNER[article]%>“Despite Opteron’s current advantages over Xeon, AMD’s gains are not necessarily coming at Intel’s expense. We’ve seen Xeon’s share drop a bit, but overall Intel’s share has stayed generally flat. And we’re seeing a good chunk of Opteron sales going into spaces previously dominated by traditional proprietary platforms like Sun’s UltraSPARC, HP's PA-RISC and IBM's POWER,” Alex Herrera, a JPR analyst, said in a research.
According to the research, workstation vendors shipped 503.8 thousand branded workstations in the second quarter of 2005, accounting for almost $1.3 billion in revenue. Dell continues to dominate the workstation market with a share of about 43%, and HP follows, recently narrowing Dell’s lead slightly. Lenovo has jumped directly to the No.3 position, thanks to picking up ThinkPad-branded mobile workstations from IBM. IBM, Sun and Fujitsu-Siemens round out the top six.
Intel Corp.’s Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium M as well as Xeon processors are used in 93% of workstations, whereas Advanced Micro Devices’ share is 2%, JPR claims.
“After signing on major OEMs in the past 18 months, AMD’s Opteron processor penetration into workstations is growing strongly, roughly doubling its share over the past three quarters,” a statement from JPR claims.
The analyst firm believes that things like dual-core processors, 64-bit extensions are becoming interesting options for clients, which supports higher average sale prices (ASPs) as well as boosts revenues.