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when AMD launched their zen architecture cpus we did an episode about what we

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could expect from their new lineup and whether team red could finally be a

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serious competitor to Intel again if you missed that one you can check it

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out up here but come on back afterwards because it's

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been over two years now and it's time to have a look at how Intel has started to

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struggle against a resurgent AMD

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in fact from late 2017 to late 2018

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AMD's market share increased by 3.8 percent on desktop 3.4 in servers and

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5.2 in notebooks and seeing as Intel is the

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player in all of these markets anything that AMD gains reflects a loss for Intel

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but why exactly is this happening well for a long time AMD was forced into

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a strategy of competing on raw price to performance as for a long time they

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simply couldn't make any chips that could come close to the performance of

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Intel's offerings forcing them to cut prices

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Intel by contrast could to a point anyway charge whatever they wanted as

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they didn't have any real competition at the higher end this allowed them to make

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much more margin all of this changed however with AMD's

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new zen architecture and although ryzen lags a bit behind Intel in some

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performance metrics notably gaming AMD

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having spent so many years operating on lower margins took a fundamentally

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different approach to their CPU design that worked really well

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to save r d they opted for a modular design that could be scaled up and down

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more easily and then for their higher end many core products they even used

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multiple smaller chiplets to decrease manufacturing waste

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this along with aggressively low pricing started to eat into Intel's dominance as

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it turns out users are happy to give up a small amount of performance for a

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significant cost savings but AMD just

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making a decent processor for a change and pricing it competitively is only

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part of the story here Intel has also had their own very public

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issues transitioning to their 10 nanometer manufacturing process

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now according to their original roadmap they should have been finished years ago

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but they still only have a few 10 nanometer skews on the market

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but why does that matter well here's the thing whenever you hear CPU aficionados

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talk about a certain number of nanometers they're referring to the

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transistor sizes on the CPU die smaller

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transistors mean that more of them can be packed onto a given area increasing

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performance as well as power efficiency that means that it's very helpful to

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make your cpus on a smaller node

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and while AMD hasn't had much issue getting their transistors down to size

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Intel has struggled unlike AMD who contracts its fabrication work to

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facilities that specialize in manufacturing different kinds of

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processors for a variety of clients Intel who owns their own fabs is more or

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less trying to figure everything out on their own it also helps to remember that for some

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time now Intel's transistor density has

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often been higher than that of AMD as numbers like 14 nanometer and 10

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nanometer are actually just estimations so a 10 nanometer Intel chip might

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actually have a distance of closer to 8 or so nanometers between transistors

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which makes further shrinkages even more challenging so this means that Intel has

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spent about the last four years trying to squeeze more blood from the stone of

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their poor 14 nanometer or plus or plus plus

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process with only small incremental performance improvements to show for it

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it's been a period of clear stagnation for team blue compared to their

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impressive track record for the prior 35 or so years

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adding insult to injury Intel's struggles with 10 nanometer have also

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been a contributing factor to the ongoing shortage of Intel cpus

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particularly at the lower end because the company has been devoting

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resources to figuring out the 10 nanometer problem it hasn't been able to

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crank out enough 14 nanometer chips to meet the ever higher demand for

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entry-level devices like chromebooks and low-power laptops

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combine this with the fact that Intel places a higher priority on high-end

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chips due to their larger profit margins and AMD has stepped in and sold tons of

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its own lower-end cpus to fill the gap

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on the subject of chromebooks Intel has additional threats on the horizon too

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qualcomm best known for their snapdragon mobile processors is trying to push a

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line right now of laptop cpus optimized

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for power savings but

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while Intel is facing a number of issues at the moment it's important to remember

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that they are still the market leader in cpus by a very wide margin with plenty

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of cash in the bank so they've got time to turn it around Intel is exploring GPU

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technology quite aggressively and they're also looking at new

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manufacturing techniques for both 10 and 7 nanometer chips it's just not clear

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when we'll see them in large numbers in the meantime though we will be carefully

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watching to see if Intel eventually loses all of its market share to its

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competitors but my money's on them figuring it out

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instead of going the way of myspace

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forward slash Techquickie we're going to have that linked below so thanks for

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watching guys like or dislike check out our other videos leave a comment with

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