Supercars driver Brodie Kostecki has described the new MARC GT prototype as a ‘bloody incredible piece of machinery.’
The Erebus Motorsport driver was given the opportunity to get behind the wheel of the LS3-powered MARC GT car during a test day at Queensland Raceway earlier this week.
There, the 24-year-old put the prototype example from the Gold Coast-based manufacturer through its peace.
“I think it was a really positive test, it’s the first real hit out that the cars had,” Kostecki told Speedcafe.com
“I believe they had a shakedown test on the Clubman Circuit [Queensland Raceway] a few weeks prior.
“We did the first half of the day without the front clip of the body on, so once that showed up we knew that the lap times were gonna drop.
“I think there’s still a lot more lap time left in it.”
The Supercars regular punched a fastest lap of 1:07.4s during the hit-out.
That provided marginally faster than the latest-spec GT3 machinery managed during qualifying when GT World Challenge Australia raced at the venue days earlier.
“It’s a bloody incredible piece of machinery,” Kostecki enthused.
“Everyone at MARC cars and PACE Innovations have done an awesome job. It’s the fastest I’ve ever gone around QR.
“The current version that I drove put out 550 horsepower, which is plenty for what they’re going to be doing.
“It was quite nice to drive, it felt like a GT car, except it was a bit quicker than a GT car, so it was bloody cool to drive it,” he added.
“It’s quite a lot different to a Supercar, it’s got a lot more downforce.
“It’s got ABS, paddle shift, all the fruit, so it’s really good for the market that they’re trying to capture.”
The MARC GT is touted as an upgrade of the MARC Focus and MARC Mazda models launched in 2014.
Inspired by the Mercedes C63, it consists of a chrome moly space frame with a bolt on front and rear crash structure.
It includes a Holinger transmission, Brembo brake package, and PACE Innovations Modular Upright system.
One thing that will help bolster adoption of cloud gaming is by making it as easy as possible to fire up a game. To that end, it is testing a way to start playing something with a single click from results, even if it’s not on the company’s own platform.
The test, which was by Bryant Chapel of The Nerf Report, not only enables folks to directly launch a game on Stadia, but it works with , and as well. If you’re enrolled in the test and search for a game on one of those platforms (such as or ), you may see a Play button in the information panel. Clicking that will either start up the game or take you to a landing page on the respective streaming platform.
and saw the feature in action too. The latter noted the search results can show if a game has a timed trial on Stadia or if it’s available for free or as part of a premium subscription.
It’s not incredibly surprising to see Google testing out such functionality. For several years, it has shown folks where they can. For instance, if you have a Netflix subscription and search for stranger things on Google, you’ll be able to start watching the show with a single click.
In hindsight, it’s a little odd that Google hasn’t offered this feature for Stadia from the jump in order to promote its cloud gaming service. On the other hand, Stadia’s store didn’t have a search function for a year and a half, which offered further evidence that the platform isn’t exactly one of Google’s highest priorities. However, Stadia is not shutting down and Google is slowly adding more features to it.
St Kilda midfielder Brad Crouch could be staring down the barrel of a stint on the sidelines following a late hit on Brisbane Lions defender Darcy Gardiner during Friday evening’s AFL match at Marvel Stadium.
During the second quarter of Brisbane’s 15-point victory, Crouch’s shoulder made heavy contact with Gardiner’s head near the boundary line.
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The dazed 26-year-old required medical attention following the ugly incident, which sparked a brief melee.
“That’s not good I don’t think,” footy icon Brian Taylor said on Channel 7 commentary.
“That’s head contact with a bump and it could’ve been a tackle.”
Melbourne AFLW footballer Daisy Pearce continued: “That’s weeks. At least a week and anything upward of that hinges on what those doctors are working out right now.”
Channel 7 commentator James Brayshaw replied: “You say that, but in the current landscape how would anyone know?”
Crouch will almost certainly come under scrutiny from the Match Review Officer, but the severity of his punishment remains unclear.
Earlier this week, the AFL Appeals Board overturned the AFL Tribunal’s decision to uphold Carlton captain Patrick Cripps’ two-match ban for rough conduct due to a lack of procedural fairness.
The outcome baffled the footy community, and the AFL Appeals Board could face further scrutiny following Crouch’s late hit at Marvel Stadium.
“Good on Carlton for pursuing it and getting their player free but I thought we were all about protecting the head and Cal Ah Chee had no chance whatsoever to protect his own head last week,” Lion coach Chris Fagan told reporters in the post- match press conference.
“And he was off early in the game last week and he’s not playing this week as a result of it so we get penalized for that and unfortunately Cal gets injured.
“We’ve just got to protect the head – it’s as simple as that.”
Melbourne great Garry Lyon fumed on Fox Footy: “It’s the greatest raffle in sport right now… it’s a farce.
“We don’t know what’s going on. ‘Procedural fairness’, come on.
“I hope this is not the start of a long concussion run for Callum Ah Chee, because we’d go back to this moment and go, ‘This is an AFL that makes a lot of noise but (doesn’t do enough)’ .”
St Kilda will need a minor miracle to qualify for the finals after Friday’s 12.9 (81) to 9.12 (66) defeat.
Brisbane opened up a 26-point buffer late in the second quarter, but for the third game in a row, they either gave up a sizeable lead, or had one eaten into significantly, as the Saints exploded in the third quarter to lead by five points, putting the Lions’ top-four ambitions in peril.
However, Brisbane’s pursuit of a double chance would’ve been severely impeded if Saints spearhead Max King kicked straight, but he could only must five behinds, including four missed set shots from directly in front in the second half when the Saints enjoyed all the momentum .
In response, Rayner stepped up to the plate, showing King how it’s done, booting three of Brisbane’s four final-quarter goals, to finish up with a team-high four majors, and prove to be the match winner.
The Saints will likely drop to 10th this weekend, meaning they will have to not only beat the Swans in Sydney in the final round next week, but will also need a raft of other results to go their way to make the finals.
Qualcomm announced its latest Wear OS chipsets in July this year: the W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1. Both SoCs are a massive upgrade over their predecessor and give Wear OS a fighting chance against the Apple Watch for the first time in years. Oppo was quick to confirm that it would be the first to launch a W5 Gen 1 smartwatch on the market, with a leak indicating the wearable would have an Apple Watch-y design. The Chinese smartphone maker has officially taken the wraps off the Oppo Watch 3 in China, with a claimed battery life of up to four days.
ANDROID POLICE VIDEO OF THE DAY
Oppo’s 2022 smartwatch lineup consists of two models: the Watch 3 and the Watch 3 Pro (via GSMArena). Both wearables feature a 5ATM-certified aluminum chassis with easily replaceable bands. Qualcomm’s W5 Gen 1 chip is ticking inside them. Unlike the W5+ Gen 1, the non-plus model lacks a low-power coprocessor, which is handled by Oppo’s Apollo 4 Plus chip.
While the best Android smartwatches feature a circular display, the Oppo Watch 3 takes design inspiration from the Apple Watch. It has a rectangular chassis housing a 1.75-inch AMOLED panel with 3D glass on top and a rotating crown on the right. Other specs include 1GB RAM, a 400mAh battery, 32GB storage, Bluetooth 5.0, eSIM support, NFC, and 100+ workout tracking modes. A 400mAh battery powers the watch, which can seemingly last up to four days. This can be extended to ten days when the watch is used in light mode. A full charge takes around 60 minutes, while a 10-minute top-up will allow the wearable to last for a day.
The Oppo Watch 3 Pro lives up to its ‘Pro’ moniker with a bigger 1.91-inch AMOLED LTPO display—a first for a wearable. The superior display tech also allows the watch to support Always-on Display. It packs a massive 550mAh battery for a claimed battery life of up to five days. With LTE, the battery life drops to four days, while in light mode, the smartwatch can last up to 15 days. Despite the larger battery, the company says topping up the cell takes just over an hour.
Both smartwatches house an array of sensors, including an accelerometer, gyroscope, optical heart rate monitor, SpO2, ECG, barometric, and ambient light sensor. They are already up for preorder in China and will go on sale starting August 19. Prices for the Oppo Watch 3 start at CNY 1,499 (~$220), with the Pro model carrying a CNY 1,899 (~$275) price tag.
In China, the Oppo Watch 3 lineup runs on proprietary software. If it makes its way to other international markets, it should run Wear OS 3, which could lead to its battery life taking a hit.
After the blistering social commentary of Jordan Peele’s first two movies, Get Out and Us, there’s an expectation that his latest, Nope, would have the same level of thematic richness.
nope toys with those expectations. The visceral and entertaining movie definitely has a lot to say about a lot of things, but there’s also a suspicion that Peele is having his own cheeky meta moment, a playful ribbing to audiences.
Because nope is nothing if not a spectacle. Peele wants you to look and he wants you to think about the exercise of him looking and consuming – and he has all the tricks to hypnotise and bewitch his audiences so they never look away.
OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) is outside on his family’s horse ranch when small objects mysteriously start falling at great velocity from the sky. His father of him is struck and killed by a coin and the ranch passes to OJ and his sister of him Em (an electric Keke Palmer).
Six months on, the ranch is struggling and OJ has had to sell horses to the neighboring theme park run by a former child actor, Jupe (Steven Yeun).
There’s a mysterious force in the skies above them, a UFO that hides inside a stationary cloud and OJ and Em and Jupe all want to exploit its presence for their own profit agendas.
But they’re going to find out they can’t bend a primal force to the will of men and a lot of blood will be spilled before the credits roll.
Utterly captivating, you can approach nope in multiple ways. If you want to have a leanback popcorn experience, Peele delivers. The film is a sensory smorgasbord – the set-pieces are variously tense, booming, draw-your-breath and exhilarating. And it’s also just really funny with Peele deploying his extensive experience in comedy.
You can go along for the ride on a pure spectacle level and inhale what it offers in visual and auditory thrills. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (dunkirk, Ad Astra, Her) does a tremendous job in shooting these expansive frames that make the story feel big.
There are visual questions to the likes of poltergeist and even The Godfatherwhile the tone, especially in that final act, evokes the Amblin movies of the 1980s.
Or you could engage with nope on a more cerebral level because Peele is working with several intersecting ideas.
There’s the man versus beast motif, which, without spoiling things, shows up in more ways than one, connecting a traumatic event in Jupe’s past to his present ambitions involving the visitor in the sky.
The main thrust of it though is these ideas around spectacle, this voracious appetite we have to be entertained, to be enticed into an experience away from the everyday, and the need to record it because if it doesn’t exist for posterity, did it even really happen?
nope can be heavy handed in how it deals with spectacle – the repetition of mirrors and reflections, including that which is captured by cameras, different aspects of performativity and a reference to chimp attack victim Charla Nash.
Of course, spectacle is almost always heavy handed, it’s about the fireworks and not grace. nope explores the cost of our obsession with spectacle and it reflects back to the audience our own complicity.
The ideas are sometimes a little undercooked and lose cohesion but Peele carefully works the balance between commentary and entertainment, which mostly succeeds.
above all, nope commands attention because it’s so conscious about itself being a spectacle and it’s asking us to decide whether it works as more than just a fun time.
St Kilda has blown a golden opportunity at the wrong time, falling to Brisbane by 15 points in game there to be won late with the Saints’ season on all the line to all but end their final hopes.
Brett Ratten’s side recovered from a slow start to come charging back into the game in the second half, but wasn’t able to convert its opportunities including a wasteful 0.5 kicking display from Max King.
Saints legend Nick Riewoldt said he hoped the club wouldn’t put all the onus on its goalkicking inaccuracy in the second half, lamenting its lackluster start to the contest.
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“They had the game where they wanted it… but I hope it doesn’t turn into a ‘we just didn’t take our opportunities’, conversation. Because early in the contest when the game was there to be won, they weren’t necessarily up for it,” he said on Fox Footy post-match.
The Saints’ final hopes were dealt a massive blow (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)Source: FOX SPORTS
“Then when it gets desperate you take it on. I hope it’s a really learning experience this game for St Kilda. When they played with a bit of desperation, especially with the footy, then they put the Lions under pressure and looked like a finals team.
“If you’re looking at it with a narrow lens, you would say they didn’t take their opportunities. Max King was bit of a liability in front of goal, he didn’t look he wanted the ball in the end, so he’ll be really disappointed that he couldn’t convert.”
St Kilda ended up winning the disposal count (327-310) and inside 50s (50-49), but converted 9.12 of its shots at goal (43 per cent) compared to Brisbane’s 12.9 (57 per cent), with Cam Rayner the match winner for the Lions with three of his four goals in the last term.
Demons legend Garry Lyon was much more encouraged by St Kilda’s style when it had more urgency and played faster and direct.
“The competitive, go slow style they’ve been playing has been left behind largely … that’s the learnings I would hope they get from it, because when they went with some stuff that looked unscripted, that’s when they looked most dangerous,” he said.
It’ll likely go down as another wasted season for the 11-10 Saints despite such a promising 5-1 start to 2022 to emerge as a premiership dark horse as Ratten was rewarded with a contract extension.
Saint in hot water over bump? | 00:41
But they’ve now won just three of their last 10 matches and would need nearly everything to go right by the way of other results for them to make finals from here including beating an in-form Swans outfit next weekend at Marvel Stadium.
Former Hawthorn sharpshooter Ben Dixon was however still giving St Kilda hope to finish in the top eight and was left unconvinced by Brisbane’s performance, calling it the “sweep escape”.
“I think Brisbane was given that game, they didn’t win it… if Richmond and Carlton lose they’ve (the Saints) still got a heartbeat. I’m giving them hope,” he said on Fox Footy Live.
But St Kilda champion Nick Dal Santo doesn’t believe his former side is currently playing a good enough brand to hold up in September.
“You want your finals series to be teams that are currently in form or capable of causing an upset from the bottom of the top eight,” he said.
“The form that the Saints have played of recent, no, I don’t think their in the best eight teams in the comp right now.”
Others responded on social media to the Saints’ blown opportunity.
When someone passes you care about – it’s a sad time. Did you know if you’re a relative or executor, then you can close their social media accounts?
Here’s how we closed a friend’s Facebook page:
Facebook has a dedicated space for Managing a deceased person’s account.
You can fill in an online form for a Special request for a medically incapacitated or deceased person’s account https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/228813257197480
You’ll need to add your contact details, and the person you would like to remove or memorialize. Add in the URL link to the person’s profile and the account’s email address.
Then you have a couple of options:
Please memorialize this account
Please remove this account because the account owner is deceased
Please remove this account because the account owner is medically incapacitated
I have a special request.
I submitted my friend’s details and Facebook account. It took around an hour or two for my application to be processed.
I received a confirmation email from Facebook titled ‘Memorialise Request’.
I’m very sorry for your loss. As you requested, we’ve memorialized your loved one’s account. You can learn more about memorialization by visiting the Help Center: https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143?ref=cr
My thoughts are with you and your loved ones. Please let me know if there are any questions I can help answer.
You can still find this person on Facebook. There is a message that says:
Remembering Person Name
We hope that people who love FirstName will find comfort in visiting her profile to remember and celebrate her life.
You can your own Tributes: Share stories, commemorate a special day or let friends and family know that you’re thinking about her.
Here I uploaded two of my favorite photos of my friend. Her mother de ella uploaded a copy of the funeral order of service de ella. I hope over time, it becomes a place where all of her relatives and friends of her can go and remember her fondly.
You might like to leave instructions in your will on how you’d like your social media accounts handled.
How to Memorialize Someone on Facebook Who’s Passed Away
For more information:
Hard Questions: What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die? https://about.fb.com/news/2017/08/what-should-happen-to-online-identity/
Adding a Legacy Contact https://about.fb.com/news/2015/02/adding-a-legacy-contact/
A splash of color and a dollop of joy has brought winter sunshine into the country’s youngest regional art gallery, with a joint exhibition of new works from two unlikely collaborators.
Last November, acclaimed artist Ben Quilty realized his ambition of establishing a public gallery in his neighbourhood, in the southern highlands of New South Wales: Ngununggula opened its doors with an exhibition called High Jinks in the Hydrangeas, a collection of photographs and installations by Sydney artist Tamara Dean.
Last weekend the gallery – a repurposed heritage-listed dairy in Retford Park on the outskirts of Bowral – unveiled its latest show, Spring Collection: an exhibition of new works by veteran painter/designer/entrepreneur Ken Done, and craft-based installation artist Rosie Deacon.
Rosie Deacon at Spring Collection. Photographer: Ashley Mackevicius
The two artists share a compulsive fascination with intense colour, and an affectionate attachment to one of Australia’s most iconic motifs, the koala.
Young Japanese tourists flocked to Done’s Sydney harborside gallery in the 1980s to buy his koalas, the artist says.
“I could draw koalas that were so cute, nine-year-old Japanese girls fainted from their very cuteness, which is what I set out to do,” Done tells the Guardian.
“Now Rosie has taken the koala into a whole different level, very exciting, very graphic.”
The lighthearted focus of the exhibition fills the brief of accessibility, Ngununggula’s director, Megan Monte, says.
“People can’t help but crack a smile.
“It’s important for a regional gallery to offer diversity, and it’s incredible for kids to see the work as well as adults … [so] that they can stop and think about what art can be. And that art is something we should all be enjoying.”
Rosie Deacon’s riotous coral reef installation was originally created for the 2022 Australian fashion week show by Romance Was Born. Photographer: Ashley Mackevicius
While there are a number of commercial art galleries dotted throughout the southern highlands, locals and Wingecarribee council had spent some previous 30 years discussing the lack of a regional public gallery in the shire – but it had amounted to little more than talk.
The instant Sydney art adviser Justin Miller showed Quilty the former Fairfax family-owned 19th century dairy property in Retford Park, the artist was sold.
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The gallery’s name, Ngununggula (pronounced “Nuhn-uhn-goola”), means “belonging” in the local Gundungurra language. Quilty admits there was initially some opposition, on the grounds some people would not be able to pronounce it; and the venue itself took more than five years to come into being.
“It was a shed filled with rolled up barbed wire and corrugated iron,” Quilty tells the Guardian.
“But it was once in a lifetime opportunity to get a proper regional gallery. To build something similar from scratch, built out of the ground, would have been around $30m. And we’ve got this for $8m, with a beautiful, nuanced heritage that binds it.”
Ben Quilty says Ngununggula was never intended as ‘a vanity project’.
Sydney architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer were tasked to redesign the National Trust-listed property, and builder/developer Richard Crookes became so involved in the project he decided to deliver it at cost. Crookes now sits on the Ngununggula board.
Quilty has no plans to exhibit his own work in the gallery anytime soon. The multi-award winning artist, who in little more than a decade has won the Prudential Eye award (2014), the Archibald prize (2011), and the Doug Moran national portrait prize (2009), said Ngununggula was never intended as “a vanity project”.
“The sooner my name is disassociated with the gallery the more everyone else’s names become involved,” he says.
Ngununggula, Ben Quilty’s gallery in the southern highlands of NSW. Photographer: Tamara Dean
“I don’t think it’s right that I should show in there for quite some time.”
In Spring Season, a dozen new works by Done flood the gallery’s first space, most on a large scale taking coral reefs as his inspiration. Several additional Done works adorn the walls of the gallery’s second space, in which Deacon’s riotous coral reef installation – originally created for the 2022 Australian fashion week show by Romance Was Born – sprouts forth from the floor.
The third space in Ngununggula has been colonized by Deacon’s mammoth multi-coloured mutation of a necklace, the fruits of a 1.5-tonne donation of polystyrene foam, gifted to Deacon by a Sydney toy manufacturer.
Both artists discussed their work at a briefing on site earlier this month.
“I tried to contain the colors … but it didn’t work,” said Deacon, who expanded a little on the joys and challenges of working collaboratively. To make the coral reef installation, she corralled her mother’s knitting circle in Deacon’s small home town of Nyngan, in central NSW; and for the necklace installation, she worked with what sounded like the entire gallery staff, including cafe employees.
The 37-year-old artist, who established her reputation in the art world comparatively early in her career, admits she was intimidated by art galleries and art school as a young person. Since graduating from the UNSW College of Fine Arts in 2009, she has shown in more than 50 exhibitions in Australia.
Deacon is self-effacing, almost dismissive, of her achievements to date. Done, less so.
“I was 40 when I had my first exhibition at Holdsworth Gallery, and three months later I opened my own,” said the 82-year-old artist, who has collected a wide assortment of accolades over the years, including the NSW Tourism award (1986), Father of the Year (1989) and an Order of Australia (1992).
Ken Done’s work for Spring Collection. Photographer: Ashley Mackevicius
As Done moved from painting to painting in Spring Collection, he self-interrogated out loud as small details within each work caught his eye.
“What are these things? I have no idea, you couldn’t look it up in a David Attenborough book,” he said, pointing to one.
‘Pretty is a very nice word’: Sweetpea Reef (2021) by Ken Done.
“What is this? I have no idea,” he continued, about another. “It’s a lot about composition, balance, a big piece here, a little piece there. It’s like a piece of music, you have to get the notes right, you have to get the rhythm right – oh, here’s a little trill thing.”
Done’s inspiration for this collection stretches far back to his boyhood, when a Saturday job at his local Coles supermarket earned him his first diving mask. He has been captivated by the underwater world ever since.
Many of the works appear to merge garden and underwater themes; and most are on show for the first time. There is a wisteria reef painting, and one called Sweetpea Reef – “because it is pretty”.
“I like that word, it’s not a very fashionable word in contemporary art society, well bugger that,” he said.
“Pretty is a very nice word, beautiful is a very nice word, decorative is a very nice word.
“All these words seem to be a bit out of fashion in certain areas – but I don’t make the rules.”
Spring Collection, new works by Ken Done and Rosie Deacon, is showing at Ngununggula in the southern highlands until 9 October
Parramatta prop Junior Paulo has been elected to play for Samoa in the World Cup, becoming the latest player to knock back the Kangaroos.
The burly front-rower has never represented Australia, but was considered a near certainty for selection for the tournament at the end of the year.
“It’s been a tough one, I’ve been torn between [the teams],” he said on 9News.
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It comes just a week after fellow Origin prop Josh Papalii also elected for the blue jersey rather than the green and gold.
Just like Papalii, and others including Brian To’o, Paulo said the feelings that stirred inside him when he thought about playing for Samoa were simply different.
“Gus Gould really hit the nail on the head when he said, ‘What nation do you cry for when you sing the anthem?’
Junior Paulo in action against Souths on Friday night. (Getty)
“That plays a big part for me, and for me that’s being proud of my home, and that’s Samoa,” he said.
According to the 28-year-old, he wants to repay the sacrifices made by the generations before him that enabled him to succeed.
“I’ve got my two grandmothers, who are both overseas and while they’re still alive I want to be able to make them proud.”
Stream the NRL premiership 2022 live and free on9Now
And much like his elders set him up, he wants to motivate the next generation to follow in his footsteps.
Blues big bopper has try taken off him
“I want to be able to inspire the next kid who is coming through the ranks and will be at home, or whether they’re in the islands watching that World Cup thinking they want to be able to represent their country,” he said.
But one thing is for sure – his decision won’t change his desire to continue to play for New South Wales.
“I’m just as passionate about both jerseys,” he said.
“One’s just a darker shade of blue, and the other one’s lighter.”
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Paul Green’s life in pictures: From Sharks prodigy to premiership-winning coach
Demand for PCs has cooled to the point that x86 CPU shipments saw a historic plunge in Q2, according to Mercury Research, which tracks component sales.
Mercury Research says desktop CPU shipments during the May to June period fell to their “lowest level in nearly three decades,” decreasing by more than 15% year over year.
The research firm didn’t provide exact shipment numbers, but Mercury Research President Dean McCarron said in an email: “I had to go back to the mid-1990s to find desktop CPU shipments in any given quarter lower than the number of units that shipped in Q2.”
In Q1, desktop CPU shipments also saw a historic quarter-on-quarter decline at 30%. “There has been a very long-term decline in desktop PC use in favor of notebooks that is the primary driver over the past decade or more. This was combined with the short-term inventory correction that has resulted in the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers ) slowing purchases of new CPUs,” McCarron added. “The combined result of both of these is the historic low.”
The research firm IDC also saw similar trends with desktop PC shipments in Q2. During this period, the desktop shipments reached just over 19 million, according to IDC analyst Ryan Reith. “While this isn’t the lowest quarter ever, it is close in terms of the last 12 years (since 2010),” he said in an email. “Early 2020 saw a quarter of 17M. The two main drivers for the slow 2Q22 are an overall sharp slowdown in PCs (the total market), as well as the continued shift towards notebook PCs.”
Mercury Research added that CPU shipments for laptops also dropped by over 30% year over year in Q2. When looking at total CPU shipments for x86 processors in the quarter, the numbers plunged 19% for the largest year-over-year decline in the 28-year history of Mercury Research’s tracking.
“While data is absent prior to 1994, the on-year decline in CPU shipments is probably the largest since 1984, when the nascent PC market experienced its first major downturn,” McCarron said.
The falling shipments are due to the current economic slowdown, which is causing PC makers to halt orders of new chips, McCarron said. Intel itself posted a rare financial loss in Q2 at $500 million, and blamed part of the problem on PC vendors slashing their product inventory levels. The plunging shipment numbers also occur a year after the COVID-19 pandemic caused PC demand to soar to levels not seen in close to a decade. Since then, demand has sagged amid high inflation and worries about an economic recession.
However, the economic downturn has been hitting Intel much harder than AMD. According to Mercury Research, Team Red experienced “positive unit growth” across all segments, including chips for laptops, desktops, and servers. This led AMD to achieve a 31.4% share across the x86 CPU market against Intel, a new high for the company.
During Q2, the only area of growth was in chips focused on IoT devices and semi-custom products, which include AMD processors for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5. Mercury Research adds: “Intel appeared to be impacted by continued inventory corrections lowering shipments in the quarter; AMD’s business showed no significant inventory impacts and share was gained.”
However, AMD itself has made a more conservative projection about future PC demand. In an earnings call last week, CEO Lisa Su said her company expects PC shipments to decline year over year by the “mid-teens,” down to around 300 million shipments for 2022.
However, AMD and Intel are preparing to launch new CPUs and graphics cards in the coming months, which could spur some demand, despite the economic troubles facing consumers.
