How do you chip away at a giant who keeps getting bigger no matter what the circumstances? AMD would pay good money for an answer, as chip giant Intel yet again increased its share of the microprocessor market, and did so even as the demand for netbooks fell significantly. Netbooks, as you know, are almost entirely powered by Intel's Atom processors, and that served Intel well from 2008 to 2010 when the netbook market enjoyed double-digit growth.
Ultrabooks may be the thin, attractive and powerful MacBook Air alternatives Intel and its manufacturer buddies hoped they would be, but as comparable as they are to Apple’s ultraportable laptop, they haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves. As we reported on Halloween, Acer and Asus are both reporting Ultrabook sales well under initial expectations. But wait! Don’t write off the Ultrabook just yet – one analytical firm thinks Ultrabooks will account for nearly half of all laptop sales by 2015.
When it comes to microprocessors, Intel’s the 800 lb. gorilla stomping around the room. AMD and ARM offer interesting products and alternatives, but the fact of the matter is that most chips simply carry the Intel stamp. A new report says that if anything, Intel’s slice of the revenue pie has only grown over the past year.
The law of gravity dictates that what goes up must come down, and unfortunately for DRAM chip makers, there's nothing that says what goes down must also go back up. DRAM pricing continues to find new rock bottoms, and according to market research firm IHS iSuppli, things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Don't get too attached to your PC, playa, it's going out of style, or at least that's the conclusion some will inevitably draw from IHS iSuppli's latest prediction. According to IHS iSuppli, Internet-enabled devices will outnumber Internet-connected PCs for the first time ever in 2013. It's not quite on the same level as saying the sky is falling, though don't be surprised if PC doomsayers once again come out of the woodwork.
Feel free to load up on DDR3 memory without worrying about it going obsolete in the next 12 months, or even 24 months. According to market research firm IHS iSuppli, DDR3 modules, which currently claim between 85-90 percent of the memory market, will remain the dominant DRAM type for at least three more years before it starts to give up ground to faster, next-generation DDR4 modules.
You can take our decked out desktop PC when you pry it from our cold, dead hands, but until then, we'll continue to play Crysis (yes, our PCs can run Crysis), burn Blu-ray discs, transfer files via USB, and watch Flash videos. You know, all the things we can't do on an iPad. Why bother bringing this up? Well, we wanted to preface what market research firm IHS iSuppli is saying, which is that rising consumer interest in tablets like the iPad is starting to take a toll on the global PC market.
The once cluttered hard drive market isn't so cluttered anymore. Back in 2000, Maxtor purchased Quantum's hard disk business, primarily for the company's ATA133 IDE interface. Then in 2006, Seagate scooped up Maxtor. A little more recently, Western Digital picked up Hitachi's storage division, giving WD a 50 percent share of the market. Seagate responded by snatching Samsung's HDD business as part of a "broad strategic alignment" between the two. So which company now wields the largest share of the HDD market?
Desktop and notebooks featuring first generation graphics-enabled microprocessors (GEMs) – chips that combine CPU and GPU cores on the same die - from chip-making giants like Intel and AMD are still fairly new to the market, but market research firm iSuppli expects GEMs like Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion to establish firm control over both the desktop and notebook PC segments by the end of 2011. Hit the jump for more on iSuppli’s GEM outlook for 2011 and beyond.
Market research firm iSuppli says the Japan earthquake and tsunami could impact component supply and pricing with "significant shortages" of some parts, causing pricing to "increase dramatically." There haven't been many reports of damage at production facilities, and the reason we could see a short supply of devices and rising prices is because of the impact on transportation and power infrastructure.Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
We introduce Intel's latest class of tablet killers and review 4 of the first Ultra...
Where have all the memorable videogame enemies gone?
This month's issue
Feature
11 Hardware Hacks
Feature
Overclock Your CPU
How-To
Supercharge Your Smartphone
Build It
A Powerful $830 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Here's what the @horse_ebooks bookmarklet (http://t.co/brE6898A) does to Maximum PC: http://t.co/Y6OhO6zk18 hours 15 min ago
- maximumpc: Microsoft on Patents: Can't We All Just Get Along? http://t.co/g0vginvG20 hours 36 min ago
- maximumpc: Google Drive Cloud Storage: Is Google Preparing To Muscle In On Dropbox? http://t.co/lCWzeYmS21 hours 1 min ago
