chic - re: AMD in the business segment - the only "big" OEM selling Athlon into the business segment is GTW - and they primarily sell to small business. There are also some CPQ Presario machines sold into the SMB segment. But that stuff in total does not amount to even 5% of the total commercial market. Intel is being generous to claim only 90% of business PCs.
CPQ, DELL, IBM and HP are 100% Intel in the commercial space. All but DELL offer AMD machines in the consumer space - so it's not anything but customer demand driving Intel.
The commercial desktop space is not a high-performance segment - 433, 500 and 550 MHz machines accounted for over 80% of 1999 commercial desktop sales. There were, of course, no RAMBUS machines sold in that segment in 1999 and my guess is there will be about zero sold in 2000 as well - with the exception of workstations, where there may be some case for RAMBUS, and where the cost premium is less of a consideration.
You can go to DELL, CPQ, IBM or HP websites and configure a commercial machine for about the same price as a midrange Athlon machine. Your example just doesn't hold water - the standard machines are not 256 MB RAMBUS machines, they are 128MB (or even 64 MB) celeron based machines, at prices under $1000 including monitor...
re: I thought dELL was big in the consumer market.
DELL's numbers in that segment are a little harder to track than CPQ, HP and IBM, who have separate consumer product lines. This in itself is an indication of DELL's lack of interest in the space - they have only WebPC. But clearly many people, like yourself, buy Dimensions and use them as consumer machines. Most estimates give DELL between 6% and 8% of the consumer market, which makes them either #4 or #5 in that segment. Up until last year, DELL had said that they were not interested in that market as it was too low margin and did not take advantage of their particular build-to-order model. They have recently started to shift that position - partly because they have approached saturation in some of their traditional commercial markets, and partly because they have, with Intel, developed "plug and chug" consumer platforms. I expect them to move more aggressively into that space in 2000, but with celeron and PIII, not with Athlon. |
