Industry Update - Q2-2005: Chipset wars, AMD's growing market share and more...

Motherboards

For the most part, motherboards are pretty stagnant these days.  The number of individual motherboard manufacturers is dwindling, and many motherboard makers are simply motherboard designers who get their boards manufactured by Foxconn or ECS.  Sometimes, you'd be surprised if you knew where your motherboard really came from.

Of course, the most interesting motherboards are all Socket-939 and LGA-775 based now; the transition from Socket-754 and Socket-478 is pretty much complete, with the former still being used for entry-level AMD motherboards.

The trend these days is to put as many PCIe x16 slots on your motherboard as possible, regardless of whether or not you can use them for SLI or CrossFire configurations.  So we've seen motherboards based on Intel, SiS and VIA chipsets with two PCIe x16 connectors, yet with no real use for the dual slots for now - other than added marketing potential. 

As we mentioned in our Computex coverage, the move to the BTX form factor is going extremely slowly.  Most manufacturers are expecting to ship less than 10% of their products in a BTX form factor, with the large majority of them forecasting numbers closer to 3%.  By the end of 2006, demand is expected to rise a bit, but the most aggressive numbers that we've seen are 30% - 35% (including OEM shipments).  The majority of manufacturers are saying that only 15% of their shipments will be BTX motherboards by the end of 2006.  The end result is that the BTX transition won't really take place in any appreciable numbers until 2007 or 2008, with BTX being the de-facto standard by 2009. 

Memory

Much like the CPU and motherboard markets, the memory market appears to be at a standstill, thanks to it also being in a transitional period.  The transition from DDR1 to DDR2 is taking much longer than expected for two reasons: the increased longevity of DDR1 and the slowing CPU market. 

Being able to run at much higher frequencies than DDR1 is the major advantage that DDR2 offers.  But since Intel's FSB is still stuck at 800MHz for the vast majority of processors, Intel platforms don't really need more than a dual channel DDR400 interface, much less DDR2-667.  AMD won't transition to DDR2 until Q2 2006, so there won't be any demand from the other side of the fence either until then.  With DDR2 not making much sense on Intel platforms and not used on AMD platforms, there's no surprise that the transition to DDR2 is taking a long time.

In fact, it sounds like one of the biggest pushes to DDR2 will be mobile, with Intel's Sonoma platform for Centrino.  By the second half of this year, most manufacturers will be ready to transition to DDR2 mobile solutions. 

Because of the slow DDR2 adoption, memory and motherboard manufacturers are thinking that it will be one more chipset generation before we see a real shift in memory technology.