Eternal enemies — Intel vs AMD
The battle of the chipmakers is heating up, with the old guard showing signs of a return to dominance while the edgy innovators are not backing down.
Intel is the world’s biggest manufacturer of x86-based computer chips, both in market value and market share.
But in recent years, the company has been taking a lashing from its biggest rival — the innovation-focused AMD.
In the last quarter of 2021, data from Mercury Research showed AMD had roughly 25.6% of the global CPU market share, including desktop, mobile, and server segments.
That is an increase of 3.9% from 2021 and marks its all-time best performance. Conversely, Intel’s market share slumped to 74.4%.
Intel’s decline in recent years has been due to repeated delays in launching chips with newer microarchitectures below 12 nanometres, leaving the company with egg on its face.
As well-known US investor Cody Willard penned in a recent MarketWatch opinion piece, Team Blue had become “boring”, taking no risks and appointing conservative executives with little appetite for innovation.
One of the biggest signs of Intel’s trouble was Apple altogether abandoning using its chips in its Mac computers, instead opting for its own ARM-based M1 chips.
These proved to offer vastly superior performance when combined with Apple’s ecosystem.
On the other hand, AMD pushed the envelope by increasing spending on research and development (R&D) over the last seven years, leading to the creation and improvement of its ground-breaking Zen architecture.
In 2021, the company spent around $2.845 billion on R&D — an increase of over 200% from its $947 million all-time low in 2015.
With more CPU cores and threads than ever before, AMD brought impressive gains in performance to multi-core applications like video editing and 3D rendering.
It also re-established itself as a great bang-for-buck option for gamers, particularly with the Ryzen 2000 and Ryzen 3000 series.
The turnaround was spearheaded by AMD CEO Lisa Su, who steered the company from the brink of bankruptcy when she took over in 2014.
Following its acquisition of Xilinx, AMD’s market cap even briefly surpassed Intel’s for the first time in its history.
Lisa Su, AMD CEO
But Intel seems to be on a path of resurgence, best illustrated by comparing the performance of its latest top-end processor with that of AMD’s.
Intel has astounded hardware reviewers with the 12th-gen Alder Lake series, which introduced a radical shift from its conventional design.
Instead of having numerous cores capable of high core clock speeds, Intel balances performance cores and efficiency cores, similar to the ARM architecture Apple has embraced with the M1 and A-series Bionic chips.
Its new approach has paid off, with the top-of-the-line Intel Core i9-12900K besting AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X in single-core and multi-core benchmarks.
Put simply, Intel’s chip is faster in various typical consumer applications — including gaming, video editing, and 3D rendering.
Below are some of the tests PC Gamer conducted comparing the performance of the two chips in productivity and gaming benchmarks.
To add insult to AMD’s injury, the Core i9-12900K has a lower recommended retail price — $589 (R8,594) compared to $799 (R11,658). Note that rand conversions exclude VAT and other taxes.
Tom’s Hardware points out that Intel now undercuts AMD’s price-to-performance ratio with the Alder Lake chips.
The big downside of the new chips is that they are only supported on expensive Z-series motherboards, meaning you have to pay extra for peak power.
But these more pricey motherboards also provide greater headroom for overclocking, an appealing feature for those looking to push their CPU to turbo speeds of around 5.5GHz.
For more sensitive budgets, Intel also offers the likes of the Core i5-12400, which is trading blows with AMD’s popular Ryzen 3 3200G.
The most recent Steam Hardware Survey showed Intel has started clawing back market share among gamers following a prolonged downturn.
A Pat on the back
According to several analysts, the pendulum swinging back towards Intel is thanks primarily to the return of engineer Pat Gelsinger as CEO in January 2021.
Gelsinger spent 30 years between 1979 and 2009 as senior vice president and general manager for Intel’s digital enterprise group. For five of these years, he was also Intel’s first-ever chief technology officer.
Among his plethora of accolades, Gelsinger is credited with managing the creation of industry-defining technologies like USB and Wi-Fi.
He has big ambitions to turn Intel into a major foundry that can churn out chips for other companies, putting it in competition with the likes of TSMC and Samsung.
The move makes plenty of sense, considering the massive demand for chips expected in the companies.
Intel is also entering the graphics card fray, with the recent launch of its dedicated Arc GPUs set to take the fight to Nvidia and AMD.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO
While Intel is yet to show a definitive turnaround, Gelsinger’s approach seems to be slowly winning favour with investors.
Whereas AMD has lost close to 30% of its value year-to-date, Intel has lost less than 10%.
Investment advisory firm Keybanc expects good and bad news for both chipmakers in the coming year.
Intel is expected to continue reclaiming some of its lost desktop and mobile market share, while AMD will counter by grabbing more of the server slice of the pie.
The continued intense competition is good news for consumers, who will benefit from rapidly advancing technology and competitive pricing.
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