AMD in the retail market

kanute

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Hey everyone. I was just curious if anyone else has noticed the same thing I have over the past month or two. I work at a Best Buy store and have noticed that we are carrying more and more computers with AMD processors. I would say probably 50-60% of the models we currently carry are using AMD chips. The laptops have seen the biggest change. We now carry several models with both athlon4 and duron processors. Just a month ago, we had none. And one other observation. We only carry 2 computers with the P4. One from HP and one from sony. I know not everyone buys computers from stores like best buy, but we sell a ton of computers to the average joe, and if this keeps up, I would guess AMDs market share is gonna keep growing and growing. And as for the customer trusting intel's name, I very rarely have a customer who demands intel. If we have similar computers and one has intel and one AMD at the same speeds, people almost always choose the AMD system to save the $75 or so that is usually the price difference. But these are just my observations. Maybe others have seen different.

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Kelledin

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Just out of curiosity, do a lot of these average joes consider a 1.4GHz P4 to be about equal to a 1.4GHz T-bird?

Kelledin

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kanute

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Surprisingly enough, we have very very few people come in to the store looking at P4 systems. There is very little interest in them. That is probably because they are priced so high and most people coming in to best buy to get a computer aren't looking for the best of the best. If they were, they wouldn't be in best buy =) Price seems to be a much more important factor to most customers and when they see a 1.4 or 1.5 Ghz P4 vs. a 1.33 Ghz athlon and the athlon system is 150 cheaper, they don't even give the P4 the time of day. Maybe when intel cuts chip prices or ships the brookdale chipset this will change, but for now, P4 is doing horrible in our store.

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peteb

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maybe there is the factor of people not buying the best in class (assuming they know how to grade it!)

let's say you offere a range of PCs (forgetting Intel/AMD) at 1.33, 1.5 and 1.7 Since the 1.5 and 1.7 may be a little more expensive too, do you think people are being thrifty to not buy the best of the class (the 1.7)? My parents, for example, would never buy the best of anything like this, since they figure a couple of models down (PC, car, washing machine etc.) is always going to do what they need for less money that the top range.

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noko

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The Best Buy by me is the same way, AMD computers mostly and they are selling well. I played around with a few Duron laptops but didn't notice how many of those where AMD. The desktops seemed to be all AMD's. I think Intel market share in Retail is going down the tube for the desktop. I think by next year this is all going to be different with AMD and Intel about 45% a piece in the market.

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lhgpoobaa

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indeed.
over here in australia we seem to be a bit behind but ive seen the following trends.
cellerons & p3's feature most often
then the athlons
interestingly i see less of the durons
and lest advertised are the p4's (and rdram for that matter)
and very few of those that DO advertise the p4 put the price of the 1.7
most are the 1.3 1.4 and 1.5.
just recently ive noticed a proliferation of ads for the high end athlons 1.2G and up.
Very aggressive pricing too. ive seen a 1.4 athie for less than a p3 1000.
not that many advert spots for the duron oddly, but if you go into one of the larger computer stores around here your likely to find that durons are powering many of the standard "complete setup" budget systems.

P.S. see that Maxtor has released the ATA 133 hard drive transfer standard? nice. not that we will see support any time soon.




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kanute

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You definately have a point peteb. Many of the people that come in to best buy to get a computer are just looking for something to write e-mails on and browse the web and such. They don't need the power, so they don't buy it. I must say however, that overall, people seem much more informed now than they were say a year ago. Not only do people know about both AMD and intel processors, but many now know the differences between SDRAM, DDR, and RDRAM. AMD's reputation has definately improved over the last year. As for Rambus, I have had customers be very interested in a system till they heard Rambus. That has killed many a sale. It's funny because we don't even carry RDRAM at best buy. Just SDRAM and recently we began to carry DDR. And to my surprise, we just last month got some Compaqs in with high end athlons and PC2100 DDR ram. Just curious though. Does anyone else think it's odd how distant the major retail manufacturers have stayed from the P4? I would guess it's mainly due to price, but I would be willing to guess performance is figured in to the equation some where. All I can say is, I love competition. Without this competiton between intel and AMD, we'd probably all be sitting here with 700 Mhz p3's right now if we're lucky. Love AMD or hate them, they're helping everyone out in the end, except intel =)

That oughta void your warrenty!