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This week both Gartner and IDC announced their server sales rankings for 2005 and there was a variety of news. Stephen Shankland at CNET:
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm’s latest Server Tracker market share report. “It’s the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.”
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
On the hardware side, Shelley Solheim at InfoWorld:
Worldwide server revenue rose in 2005 driven largely by increased sales of x86-based servers, according to figures released by market research firms Gartner and IDC Research this week.
Worldwide server revenue in 2005 grew 4.5 percent to $51.7 billion, while server shipments grew 12.7 percent to 7.6 million units from the previous year, according to Gartner. IDC estimates revenue grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion, while shipments grew 11.6 percent to 7 million servers.
For the 4th quarter, Gartner had somewhat slower growth year to year while IDC estimated a slight decline.
Although the two research firms’ numbers vary, the overall message was the same: lower-end servers based on x86 microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices continue to outpace sales of midrange and higher-end enterprise servers.
Revenue for the x86 server market grew 11 percent year-over-year to $25.7 billion, while shipments were up 14.3 percent to 7 million units, according to Gartner. Revenue for RISC-Itanium Unix servers remained about flat year-over-year, increasing 0.5 percent to $15.4 billion, while shipments were down 5.3 percent to 460,000 units, said Gartner.
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IBM continued to lead the server market with 32.1 percent revenue share followed by Hewlett-Packard, at 28.2 percent, Dell, with 10.5 percent and Sun Microsystems Inc. with 9.6 percent share, according to Gartner. IDC reported similar figures, with IBM accounting for 32.9 percent of the market, HP with 27.7 percent, Dell with 10.3 percent and Sun with 9.5 percent.
Jeffrey Burt also has more at eWeek.
None of the above are really surprising – they reflect longstanding trends in server software and hardware commoditization. Windows would have reached first place some time ago if not for Linux which takes server OS commoditization one step further.
Microsoft has confirmed the battery draining bug that affects laptops with the Intel Core Duo chipset and processor. Tom Krazit has the details at CNET:
Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a flaw in its USB 2.0 drivers for Windows XP Service Pack 2 that can cause a notebook to consume power at a faster-than-expected rate when using a peripheral device.
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Microsoft published a Knowledge Base article on the subject in July 2005, but made that information available only to PC vendors and partners, a company representative said in a statement. The software maker is not releasing the article to the public, but a copy was posted on Slashdot that industry sources have confirmed was the original article.
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In the private Knowledge Base article, Microsoft outlined a fix that involved modifying the registry key for USB 2.0. However, since then the company has realized that this is an impractical fix for most users, and is working on a new fix that could involve a BIOS update patch, a company representative said in a statement.
Intel is also working on a fix. It’s not known how widespread the problem is – other Intel and AMD processors may also be impacted.
Ashlee Vance at The Register:
Investors celebrated Wednesday afternoon after AMD issued glowing fourth quarter results. Record sales of server and notebook processors pushed AMD’s revenue higher, and shareholders remained bullish on AMD after seeing the sales figures. AMD’s stock surged more than ten per cent in the after-hours markets.
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Excluding the results of the memory unit AMD has spun out as Spansion, AMD posted fourth quarter sales of $1.35bn – a 78 per cent year-over-year increase. In addition, its net income hit $268m as compared to $59m in 2004.The AMD results are in stark contrast to those from much larger chipmaker Intel, which yesterday missed its own fourth quarter earnings forecast. While Intel pointed to weak demand for PC chips as one reason for this miss, AMD celebrated its server, notebook and PC products.
We mentioned Intel’s disappointing earnings on Wednesday.
