when AMD launched their zen architecture cpus we did an episode about what we
could expect from their new lineup and whether team red could finally be a
serious competitor to Intel again if you missed that one you can check it
out up here but come on back afterwards because it's
been over two years now and it's time to have a look at how Intel has started to
struggle against a resurgent AMD
in fact from late 2017 to late 2018
AMD's market share increased by 3.8 percent on desktop 3.4 in servers and
5.2 in notebooks and seeing as Intel is the
player in all of these markets anything that AMD gains reflects a loss for Intel
but why exactly is this happening well for a long time AMD was forced into
a strategy of competing on raw price to performance as for a long time they
simply couldn't make any chips that could come close to the performance of
Intel's offerings forcing them to cut prices
Intel by contrast could to a point anyway charge whatever they wanted as
they didn't have any real competition at the higher end this allowed them to make
much more margin all of this changed however with AMD's
new zen architecture and although ryzen lags a bit behind Intel in some
performance metrics notably gaming AMD
having spent so many years operating on lower margins took a fundamentally
different approach to their CPU design that worked really well
to save r d they opted for a modular design that could be scaled up and down
more easily and then for their higher end many core products they even used
multiple smaller chiplets to decrease manufacturing waste
this along with aggressively low pricing started to eat into Intel's dominance as
it turns out users are happy to give up a small amount of performance for a
significant cost savings but AMD just
making a decent processor for a change and pricing it competitively is only
part of the story here Intel has also had their own very public
issues transitioning to their 10 nanometer manufacturing process
now according to their original roadmap they should have been finished years ago
but they still only have a few 10 nanometer skews on the market
but why does that matter well here's the thing whenever you hear CPU aficionados
talk about a certain number of nanometers they're referring to the
transistor sizes on the CPU die smaller
transistors mean that more of them can be packed onto a given area increasing
performance as well as power efficiency that means that it's very helpful to
make your cpus on a smaller node
and while AMD hasn't had much issue getting their transistors down to size
Intel has struggled unlike AMD who contracts its fabrication work to
facilities that specialize in manufacturing different kinds of
processors for a variety of clients Intel who owns their own fabs is more or
less trying to figure everything out on their own it also helps to remember that for some
time now Intel's transistor density has
often been higher than that of AMD as numbers like 14 nanometer and 10
nanometer are actually just estimations so a 10 nanometer Intel chip might
actually have a distance of closer to 8 or so nanometers between transistors
which makes further shrinkages even more challenging so this means that Intel has
spent about the last four years trying to squeeze more blood from the stone of
their poor 14 nanometer or plus or plus plus
process with only small incremental performance improvements to show for it
it's been a period of clear stagnation for team blue compared to their
impressive track record for the prior 35 or so years
adding insult to injury Intel's struggles with 10 nanometer have also
been a contributing factor to the ongoing shortage of Intel cpus
particularly at the lower end because the company has been devoting
resources to figuring out the 10 nanometer problem it hasn't been able to
crank out enough 14 nanometer chips to meet the ever higher demand for
entry-level devices like chromebooks and low-power laptops
combine this with the fact that Intel places a higher priority on high-end
chips due to their larger profit margins and AMD has stepped in and sold tons of
its own lower-end cpus to fill the gap
on the subject of chromebooks Intel has additional threats on the horizon too
qualcomm best known for their snapdragon mobile processors is trying to push a
line right now of laptop cpus optimized
for power savings but
while Intel is facing a number of issues at the moment it's important to remember
that they are still the market leader in cpus by a very wide margin with plenty
of cash in the bank so they've got time to turn it around Intel is exploring GPU
technology quite aggressively and they're also looking at new
manufacturing techniques for both 10 and 7 nanometer chips it's just not clear
when we'll see them in large numbers in the meantime though we will be carefully
watching to see if Intel eventually loses all of its market share to its
competitors but my money's on them figuring it out
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