14 DAY TRIAL // During the last year, the computer processor manufacturing company AMD encountered a series of hard bumps along its road to a new line of products. Competing against a giant company like Intel is always hard, but doing it without the necessary tools ? in this case a line of products capable of smashing or at least equaling the competition ? is almost suicidal, and AMD's financial difficulties are proof of this.
But it looks like the intense marketing of the new AMD product line finally starts to pay off as according to a market research firm, on the United States computer retail market, both desktop and mobile systems based on AMD processors registered important increases in sales. Having a 51 percent market share in July, AMD just managed to rob Intel of more that 13 percent of the market, while the year on year market increase was of 4.3 percent. The news site tgdaily is citing the Current Analysis market research company and says that this increase is the direct result of an aggressive pricing policy that initially led AMD to some losses but then helped the smaller company gain a bigger market share as customers were attracted by the better prices. "As evidenced by several of the back-to-school product refreshes this year, AMD has aligned with its OEM partners such as HP and Gateway to bring assertively priced design wins to market. As a result, AMD systems now offer a much lower average selling price than its rival Intel," stated Toni Duboise, senior analyst for the market research firm.
The retail desktop market in the United States was always a strong supporter of AMD processors and the sales results from the past few months are no exception, as Current Analysis estimates that almost 67 percent of all desktop computer systems sold through the retail channel in July were based on AMD processors, while Intel's share was much lower, only 33.4 percent. Even with a clear retail market dominance, AMD did not make big money of that market as its products were priced lower than the ones from Intel. The average selling price of an AMD-based computer system was $536 in July, while Intel based PCs went for an average of $657 and sometimes even more.
Among the desktop computer systems that were equipped with AMD processors, the best selling one was the HP Pavilion a6110n which comes with an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor, a 320 GB hard drive and 2 GB of main memory while featuring a price tag of $545. On the other side of the fence, the best Intel selling computer was the HP Pavilion a6120n with a Core 2 Duo E4400 CPU, a 320 hard drive and 2 GB system memory for $610. More surprisingly is the fact that even on the mobile computing market AMD showed a strong presence and that was traditionally an almost Intel only fiefdom because of the very successful Centrino and Santa Rosa platforms. It is said that on the United States market, more that 44 percent of the laptops sold were equipped with AMD processors, which would mean an all times record for the company. Even if the price difference between the desktop systems from AMD and Intel is not so strong on the mobile segment, AMD laptops are more popular now than Intel based ones.