Core2 and Atom makes up 70% of Q4 2010 Intel CPU market share!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I was surprised by this:

http://www.fudzilla.com/processors/i...s-market-today

OTH,I suppose the ability of Intel to churn out loads of the socket 775 CPUs on the cheap does help as does the fact they use cheaper motherboards too.

[Rob_B]

What is that relative to recent years though (ie high end vs low end?)

I don't know whether I'm pretending to know stuff or just making it up but I'd imagone the high end market has diped what with global financial problems. Gone are the days when I'd rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish hundreds of pounds on a new CPU/mobo etc & I realise they are still available but have to wonder what sales are like?
Have a young group of hardware enthusiasts with disposable income like I used to have replaced my 'generation' ?

Maybe figures are scewed by Atom 7 the tablet rush recently, that will probably die down soon enough though.

[DanceswithUnix]

Not too surprising. People at work are just starting to buy core i3 machines (last gen, not the new ones) so they are only just becoming competitive at the low end. Low end is what most people buy as well, I don't know of anyone I work with who has a more powerful machine than my AMD 955BE despite it being what I would call mid-range.

[Pob255]

Same here, we're still getting pentium dual cores and some core2duo's mainly because they are cheaper and more than sufficent for office/internet usage.
When you are looking at 30+ pc the difference between £350 per pc for the pentium and £450 per pc for the i3, that's £3000 for nothing in the way of performance that an end user would notice for just office/internet type general usage.

I think the big issue really is that general office/internet use doesn't need that much grunt, it's just specialist software and games that is pushing the trend for ever more power

[scaryjim]

Standard desktop configuration here is a Core 2 Duo E8400. Always struck me as massive overkill for an office machine, although I suppose since we're an academic institution it's intended to do for people analysing moderate-sized datasets too, so perhaps it's not that daft.

But yeah, every new machine bought here that isn't for a special purpose is Core 2.