Is Intel Losing its market against AMD?

Nishant Bhavsar

Mumbai

Earlier this year, Intel had to be sweating when AMD launched its third generation processor Zen 2 Ryzen. AMD developed its all-new architecture with clock speed improvements, core counts and instructions per clock in addition to a performance that matched or even beat Intel’s CPUs.

Furthermore, AMD also launched 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 9 3900x and 3950x CPUs. It doubled the thread count and is considered to be capable of competing with i9-9900 series chips. This ultimately resulted in threatening Intel’s gaming market as well as workstation territory. In order to bring some competition, Intel was forced to launch the Cascade Lake i9-10980X which was half the price of precious 9980XE model. Unfortunately for Intel, AMD’s 3950X was still able to keep pace with i9-10980X in most tests, despite it costing only $750.

The latest reviews on AMD’s recently released 32-core 3970X and 24-core 3960X Threadripper processors add more fuel to the fire against Intel. Its High-End Desktop (HEDT) chips have better performance not only for videos but also for 3-D rendering as compared to Intel’s latest i9-10980X CPU. Even Intel’s high-end workstation Xeon CPUs look outdated as compared to 3960X. And Intel’s path ahead looks even bleaker considering AMD is yet to release its 64-core Threadripper 3990X.

Rise of AMD

3 years ago, AMD launched its Zen architecture and after that, it has progressed with a good pace. When Intel launched 8-core i7-6900 which seemed to have all the cores you needed for getting work done at price $1,100, AMD launched their 8-core Ryzen 7 1800 at just $499. And after a few months, they launched Threadripper 1950X with no fewer than 16 cores at $999 which is still half of the price of Intel’s 18-core i97980XE.

In a short time, AMD has progressed from 8 to 32 cores and moved from 14-nanometres process down to 7-nanometres while making big architectural improvements to cut the gap in IPC. AMD’s new Threadripper chips pose a huge problem for Intel in terms of performance and it seems Intel has nothing to counter them for at least for a while. The closest chip is the 28- core Xeon W-3275M.

Performance-wise, AMD’s Threadripper 3960X and 3970X chips have outperformed Intel’s Core i9-10980XE in every possible workstation benchmark including single-threaded mode. In conclusion, Threadripper gives a much more efficient rendering per dollar as compared to Intel’s expensive yet comparatively underperforming chips. And the path ahead for Intel is full of obstacles and hurdles. Even if Intel 10-nanometer Ice Lake which is supposed to release next year performs to its promised benchmark, it will soon face stiff competition from AMD’s Zen3 4000-series chip.

To conclude, average masses will prefer something that can perform optimally for both video editing as well as games. -(By Nishant Bhavsar – the author is computer engineer.)