A while back, we did an episode focusing on why Intel was suddenly struggling in its
fight against AMD when Team Blue had long been dominant.
But as AMD continues to cut into Intel's market share, you can bet that Intel has
a plan to strike back. So let's have a look at what we could expect in the near future.
One major AMD innovation that has helped keep costs down is its use of chiplets, smaller
dies that can be put together in a modular fashion to form a whole processor.
Intel continued to stick with more traditional monolithic designs for quite a while.
But remember that the electronics industry is full of copycats, and even a company as
big as Intel is no different.
Intel has already announced that it too will be focusing on using a more modular design
similar to chiplets moving forward, which should enable them to lower prices generally,
but obviously Intel can't just say, see we're doing the same thing as AMD and expect people
to go for it. I mean, it wasn't exactly a surprise when Burger King's Big Mac knockoff didn't shatter
sales records. So Intel is trying to hang its hat on some of its own innovations.
You see, there's a trend in the semiconductor industry towards fabless chip design, that
is companies like AMD and NVIDIA design processors, but then send them off to a third-party fab
like TSMC to actually have the things made.
The idea here is that outsourcing the actual manufacturing is cheaper than running your
own fab. It also reduces delays in manufacturing problems because outside fabs tend to be very good at
manufacturing many different types of chips efficiently.
And even though Intel is reportedly using TSMC for its upcoming desktop graphics chips,
at least for the time being, Team Blue has long operated its own fabs and shows no signs
of changing course despite past rumors. Although Intel's had many well-documented issues trying to get its 10 nanometer process
off the ground, it's still banking on its own fabs and their new 10 nanometer superfin
process to improve performance. Basically, it's a variation on FinFET, which was explained in this video, that allows for
more electrical current and less resistance, which should ultimately make for faster chips.
Intel claims that this is the biggest performance lead they've ever had that doesn't involve
actually going to a smaller manufacturing process. In fact, they're so confident in their own fabs that they're actually expanding their
capacity and opening what they call Intel Foundry Services, which will operate as a
contract manufacturer for other companies similar to TSMC.
Team Blue is already targeting electronics industry giants like Qualcomm and Apple to
be potential future customers for Foundry Services, which would open up a whole new
way to bring in that sweet paper without focusing only on going head to head with AMD.
But of course they still are going directly up against Team Red, not only with their
chiplets, but with the elephant in the room we haven't discussed.
Their new ZHPG graphics platform.
Intel's first significant foray into discrete graphics cards in, I think, literal decades.
Its first product looks like it'll be a mid-tier card that could go up against an RX 6700 XT
or NVIDIA's RTX 3060, so it could end up being yet another way Intel will try to compete
on price. And with the current GPU shortage worldwide, there's a possibility that the super high
demand for existing GPUs could push gamers to try out Intel's offering, provided they
find a way to make enough supply available. And speaking of graphics, Intel has already publicly said laptop gaming is going to be
a huge focus, with the goal being for lower power Z variants to deliver playable frame
rates and big name titles even on thin and light notebooks. Of course it remains to be seen how these moves will work out for Intel, but you can
bet they are taking AMD's challenge lightly.
You could say they're even rising to it.
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