{"id":439992,"date":"2022-04-05T12:01:37","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T10:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=439992"},"modified":"2022-04-05T12:05:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-05T10:05:40","slug":"intel-vs-amd-eternal-enemies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/hardware\/439992-intel-vs-amd-eternal-enemies.html","title":{"rendered":"Eternal enemies \u2014\u00a0Intel vs AMD"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Intel is the world’s biggest manufacturer of x86-based computer chips, both in market value and market share.<\/p>\n

But in recent years, the company has been taking a lashing from its biggest rival \u2014 the innovation-focused AMD.<\/p>\n

In the last quarter of 2021, data from Mercury Research<\/strong><\/a> showed AMD had roughly 25.6% of the global CPU market share, including desktop, mobile, and server segments.<\/p>\n

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%.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As well-known US investor Cody Willard penned in a recent MarketWatch opinion piece<\/strong><\/a>, Team Blue had become “boring”, taking no risks and appointing conservative executives with little appetite for innovation.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

These proved to offer vastly superior performance when combined with Apple’s ecosystem.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 2021, the company spent around $2.845 billion<\/strong><\/a> on R&D \u2014 an increase of over 200% from its $947 million all-time low in 2015.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It also re-established itself as a great bang-for-buck option for gamers, particularly with the Ryzen 2000 and Ryzen 3000 series.<\/p>\n

The turnaround was spearheaded by AMD CEO Lisa Su, who steered the company from the brink of bankruptcy when she took over in 2014.<\/p>\n

Following its acquisition of Xilinx, AMD’s market cap even briefly surpassed Intel’s for the first time in its history.<\/p>\n

\"Lisa<\/a>

Lisa Su, AMD CEO<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Intel has astounded hardware reviewers with the 12th<\/sup>-gen Alder Lake series, which introduced a radical shift from its conventional design.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Put simply, Intel’s chip is faster in various typical consumer applications \u2014 including gaming, video editing, and 3D rendering.<\/p>\n

Below are some of the tests PC Gamer conducted<\/strong><\/a> comparing the performance of the two chips in productivity and gaming benchmarks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To add insult to AMD’s injury, the Core i9-12900K has a lower recommended retail price \u2014 $589 (R8,594) compared to $799 (R11,658). Note that rand conversions exclude VAT and other taxes.<\/p>\n

Tom’s Hardware points out that Intel now undercuts AMD’s price-to-performance ratio with the Alder Lake chips.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The most recent Steam Hardware Survey showed Intel has started clawing back<\/a> <\/strong>market share among gamers following a prolonged downturn.<\/p>\n

A Pat on the back<\/strong><\/h3>\n

According to several analysts, the pendulum swinging back towards Intel is thanks primarily to the return of engineer Pat Gelsinger<\/strong><\/a> as CEO in January 2021.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Among his plethora of accolades, Gelsinger is credited with managing the creation of industry-defining technologies like USB and Wi-Fi.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The move makes plenty of sense, considering the massive demand for chips expected in the companies.<\/p>\n

Intel is also entering the graphics card fray, with the recent launch of its dedicated Arc GPUs<\/a><\/strong> set to take the fight to Nvidia and AMD.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO<\/p><\/div>\n

While Intel is yet to show a definitive turnaround, Gelsinger’s approach seems to be slowly winning favour with investors.<\/p>\n

Whereas AMD has lost close to 30% of its value year-to-date, Intel has lost less than 10%.<\/p>\n

Investment advisory firm Keybanc<\/strong><\/a> expects good and bad news for both chipmakers in the coming year.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The continued intense competition is good news for consumers, who will benefit from rapidly advancing technology and competitive pricing.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Intel Arc S Limited Edition announced<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intel and AMD’s battle for chip dominance is unrelenting. This is what it means for consumers in 2022. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":439994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[577,77686,605,73014,35,131,77684,74122,71088],"class_list":["post-439992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","tag-amd","tag-amd-ryzen-9-5950x","tag-apple","tag-chip-manufacturers","tag-headline","tag-intel","tag-intel-core-i9-12900k","tag-lisa-su","tag-pat-gelsinger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439992"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440024,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439992\/revisions\/440024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}