November 08, 2023

Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

November 08, 2023/ Ryan Shrout

This launch is made even more interesting due to the pending onslaught of competition coming the PC space from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Only days prior to the Apple announcement, Qualcomm had shown the Snapdragon X Elite SoC that will come in 2024, making some significant claims of performance relative to the best from its rivals. Heading out to my local retailer on Tuesday I picked up a pair of the new MacBook Pro laptops to do some testing and get a feel for how well these new devices compare to other systems powered by Intel and AMD, as well as my own M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro.

November 01, 2023

Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

November 01, 2023/ Ryan Shrout

At the heart of all the new MacBook Pro laptops is a series of M3 processors, for the first time announced and available in the same window. It has been less than a year since Apple launched the M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, and only four months since we saw the M2 Max released. This is a very fast cadence for a whole new family of processors and probably indicates that sales of that generation weren’t living up to expectations.

October 30, 2023

Snapdragon X Elite Rivals Best CPUs in Single Thread Performance

October 30, 2023/ Ryan Shrout

Last week during its annual Snapdragon Summit held in Maui, Qualcomm dropped a bomb on the computing world with the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite processor, a new SoC targeted at the notebook PC going squarely after the likes of Intel, Apple, and AMD. You’ll no doubt find a lot of articles posting this morning that summarize a collection of about six different benchmarks that the press was able to witness being run (no true hands on), but I wanted to focus on one particular set of results of interest to me.

October 25, 2023

New Qualcomm laptop chips will pressure Intel, AMD in 2024

October 25, 2023/ Ryan Shrout

Earlier this week I published a piece here on MarketWatch describing the coming interest and marketing dynamics in the chips landscape centered around the idea of client AI, or AI processing that runs locally on a device like a laptop or a smartphone, rather than in the cloud. Now this week, during the company’s annual technology summit, Qualcomm has taken the wraps off an interesting combination of products paired with some eye-opening claims. These new products have the capability to shift the balance of power in the PC space.

September 06, 2017

AMD is gaining ground on Intel faster than analysts had thought

September 06, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

Sales of AMD’s new Ryzen processor for consumer PCs may be gaining more ground than many investors and market analysts have been predicting. One of the bigger hardware resellers in Europe, Germany’s MindFactory, an online and physical retailer, makes sales data public and it has been compiled to show the changes in unit sales and revenue comparing AMD to Intel. Starting with March of this year, the launch of the first AMD Ryzen processors, the shift at this retailer has been astonishing.

August 31, 2017

New AMD Ryzen Pro brings competition and performance to commercial PC markets due for a refresh

August 31, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

Back in late June, AMD announced a commercial version of the Ryzen product family. The Ryzen Pro series of processors levies the success of the Zen architecture and the Ryzen consumer products in hopes to make in-roads on the enormous market opportunity that commercial and managed enterprise desktop sales offer. The top three PC OEMs are on-board with AMD for the first time, bringing an air of credibility that previous commercial products lacked.

August 24, 2017

Nvidia and AMD are deluged with orders for PC graphics cards

August 24, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

For the first time in nearly a decade, the sales of PC graphics add-in cards rose in the second quarter. Add-in cards are the discrete, high performance graphics solutions for PCs that are typically used by gamers, workstations, rendering farms, and enterprise segments that need high performance graphics capability. Based on data from Jon Peddie Research, add-in card sales rose by 30.9% sequentially and more 34.9% year over year.

August 22, 2017

Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

August 22, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

Intel is taking an aggressive stance with this release, doubling the processor core count from two to four, essentially doubling the amount of computing that each processor will be able to perform in the power restraints of the laptop segment. Because a notebook has to operate with limited power consumption and heat creation to stay inside a standard form factor, balancing performance and power draw is of critical importance. Intel is placing a bet with the 8th Generation Core products that the added processing capability will be used more effectively by software going forward, and that it can offer that capability without sacrificing the vital performance of higher clock rates needed by today’s applications and operating systems.

June 15, 2017

AMD and Intel Race Towards High Core Count CPU Future

June 15, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

As we prepare for a surprisingly robust summer season of new hardware technologies to be released to the consumer, both Intel and AMD have moved in a direction that both seems inevitable and wildly premature. The announcement and pending introduction of high core count processors, those with many cores that share each company’s most modern architecture and design, brings with it an interesting combination of opportunity and discussion. First and foremost, is there a legitimate need for this type of computing horsepower, in this form factor, and secondly, is this something that consumers will want to purchase?

February 25, 2017

Anecdotal: Early AMD Ryzen Pre-orders Show Exceptional Demand

February 25, 2017/ Ryan Shrout

With dwindling market share in the consumer space and most recent reports showing well under 20% for AMD, the excitement and demand for Ryzen is a welcome change for its CPU division. AMD’s marketing team is well practiced in churning up fans and communities to enthusiasm levels well beyond most other silicon providers thanks in large part to the personnel in its GPU/Radeon division. It now appears that the passage of time, and the pent-up demand for any competition to Intel in the mainstream gaming and enthusiast markets, is going to provide a boost for AMD in 2017.

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