Hardware in Green, Blue, Black & Red - Page 2

Intel leads as AMD bleeds

Last year's gap widened as AMD (NYSE: AMD) continued to thrash in the water like a wounded whale. Just as it was ready to ship the Barcelona processor, AMD had to pull the plug when a very rare, obscure bug surfaced that could show up in a virtualized setting.

Most of the year was spent falling further behind Intel in performance and market share, but vendors weren't ready to completely abandon AMD. No one wants a single provider for any part, least of all the CPU. It was in everyone's best interest to see a viable AMD.

After losing money all year, CEO Hector Ruiz was out and COO Dirk Meyer took over. Suddenly, the number two guy was large and in charge, acting like he was an outsider brought in to right the ship. He's certainly been a lot feistier than the soft-spoken Ruiz ever was.

And he delivered. His first quarter at the helm was almost profitable. AMD shipped Shanghai, the successor to Barcelona, three months early and faster than expected. Next month will see a slew of new desktop products. AMD is also preparing to dump its fabrication plants as independent chip manufacturing companies, which should take a huge financial strain off the company.

The bright spots for AMD this year were its ATI graphics division, which soared past nVidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) for the first time in ages, and the launch of the Puma laptop platform, which will compete with Intel's Centrino.

For its part, Intel continued to execute without a misstep, launching a fifth generation Centrino, a new six-core Xeon, and it shipped Core i7, a.k.a. Nehalem on time. Nehalem is an ambitious new design that radically changes the structure of Intel-based systems. There was a lot of room for error, but Intel got it out on time and testers are reporting tremendous performance gains.

Now if only people had the money to buy one.

Dude, you're getting a second wind

Sometimes, letting the founder return to head the company he started is a recipe for failure.

And then there's Michael Dell. When he stepped out of the CEO's office, Dell was a $3 billion company. When he returned, it was a $60 billion company. It was also in serious trouble, having lost its way, failing to grab significant share outside the U.S., missing out on the retail channel and lacking a corporate reseller channel.

After bouncing Kevin Rollins as CEO, Michael turned the ship around, remarkably so. Dell has gone on an acquisitions streak, something it wasn't known for doing. It went into retail, adopted a formal channel strategy that HP and IBM have had for years, and worked on international expansion. [cob:Special_Report]

Dell is now profitable and showing the best growth rate of the top tier hardware vendors. The company is making headway in its bread and butter, datacenters. It has a new storage business, and is even getting into supercomputing. In the end, his second term as CEO may prove more notable than his first.

Building an Apple future

Apple has always been strong in education. This infamous picture, taken in a class at the Missouri School of Journalism, speaks for itself. Apple is gaining with younger people at an incredible rate on campuses, thanks to Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) vibe as a trendy, hip vendor. Go to any gym and you'll see the distinctive white wires of an iPod sticking out of everyone's ears.

Every quarter, Apple discusses the enormous success of its chain of stores (over 247 worldwide now), and one of the stats that CFO Peter Oppenheimer cites is that half of all Macs sold at the store is to new computer owners. That is, people who have never had a computer before.

The most recent report by network traffic analyzer Net Applications found that Windows stayed static in 2008, but Mac OS grew. From January to November 2008, Windows XP/Vista held a combined 86 percent of users tracked by Net Applications, but Mac OS X grew from 7.57 percent to 8.87 percent. In January 2007, it was 6.40.

What this seems to say is Microsoft isn't growing the market, Apple is. Apple is causing the population of computer owners to expand, which is rather remarkable as Apple computers are not cheap. They are notoriously expensive, and this was reflected in traffic by nation.

While the overall Mac figures were 8.87 percent worldwide, 10.67 of U.S. traffic was Mac, 10.65 percent was from Japan, 16.56 percent came from Switzerland is, 18 percent from Iceland Monaco, playground of the rich, was 20 percent Macintosh. With the economy in freefall, it remains to be seen if Apple can sustain those numbers.

Somehow, though, we're reluctant to underestimate Steve Jobs.