After the release of Alder Lake-S, a 12th generation that offers spectacular performance, Intel once again wins over users. AMD falls on the desktop with Ryzen 5000s, which have not dropped enough in price and have become an uninteresting option. There is no value for money anymore while Intel is raising prices but consistently.
Not only Intel has managed to gain a 10% share, but also AMD has fallen to nearly 40%. This data offers 2 different readings, and I’d like to offer you both, as Intel has won over with its 12th generation desktop, while AMD is losing users.
This is not a one-off launch, but since 2019 we have not seen AMD trump Intel with new processor launches. Overall for all CPUs, Intel’s market share exceeds 60%, but that was more or less already known, as it was already above 60% by early 2021.
Intel’s sales growth is not only related to Alder Lake-S, but also to notebooks and servers (Xeon). AMD has apparently paid dearly for the shortage through its reliance on TSMC. In contrast, Intel makes its own chips and is not dependent on outside suppliers, giving it more leverage to control its chips.
Every strategy has its risks:
AMD relied on delegating chip manufacturing to TSMC because it has the most advanced lithography, but that creates dependency. Intel improved architectures but is still stuck between 10 and 14 nm, which leads to very high consumption. However, the company makes its own chips and has full control over the supply.
According to the source, AMD had to decide which chips to prioritize for production, so they chose the server (EPYC) and notebook (Ryzen) platforms. As a result, they had to sacrifice the Ryzen 5000 supply, which led to some bottlenecks and a loss of price competitiveness.
AMD’s moment came with Intel Rocket Lake-S, where the Intel vs AMD battle began. Considering the prices of Alder Lake-S and Zen 3… it makes more sense to go for Intel than AMD as you are buying much more modern chips (DDR5, PCIe 5.0, more cores and threads, etc.).
Intel still has one challenge to overcome: lithography. They need to move upstream and things could get very difficult with their Intel Arc Alchemist, which is made by TSMC. Failure on this front would weaken the company economically, making for a very interesting 2022 in the CPU and GPU sector.