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on the planet for mainstream laptops, desktops, and servers for most of the past two decades. Its products represent the default option, the safe choice. Over time, Intel CPUs have become more-or-less synonymous with "the best and fastest CPUs." But Intel hasn't had much luck delivering significant performance gains on a core-for-core basis since Sandy Bridge launched in 2011. Improvements have come incrementally and often relied on SIMD instruction set optimization or specific test cases. So long as Intel faced no meaningful market competition, there was no real argument against the idea that

AMD says it'll report its server share details later in the year when IDC reports, but the question of AMD's relatively slow ramp in servers comes up practically every conference call, and I'm sure it'll come up again when they eventually publish. What everyone remembers is this graph: What this graph shows is that somewhere between January 2005 and June of 2006, AMD's server market share went from ~5-7 percent to ~22 percent in just 18 months. There are several reasons why AMD isn't repeating that ramp this time around. First, the chart's starting position is incorrect. AMD didn't begin tryin