AMD Has Done A Solid Job But Their Lead is ‘Over’ With Alder Lake Consumer & Sapphire Rapids Server CPUs

In an interview with CRN, Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, stated that AMD’s lead over them will be over with the release of Alder Lake & Sapphire Rapids CPUs.

Intel CEO Says AMD Has Done A Great Job But Their Lead Is Over With Alder Lake & Sapphire Rapids CPUs

In the previous interview, Pat Gelsinger revealed how Intel’s Alder Lake chips will feature three AMD Zen-Like architectural innovations. In the latest interview, Pat revealed how his company plans to innovate with a solid roadmap and architectural foundation while ending the lead of competitors with new product designs such as CPUs, GPUs, and Software APIs.

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“AMD has done a solid job over the last couple of years. We won’t dismiss them of the good work that they’ve done, but that’s over with Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids,” he said.

Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger (via CRN)

From the quote above, Intel’s CEO acknowledges that AMD has done a solid job over the last years, especially with its Zen core architecture and its iterations but he states that AMD’s solid run is over with the release of Alder Lake consumer and Sapphire Rapids server CPUs.

When you flip over to the PC side, we’re very happy with [what we presented at Intel] Architecture Day, bringing our hybrid solutions, where we have performance leadership and energy efficiency leadership with Alder Lake. We think that’s a game changer because we’re going to be able to compete on both dimensions where [AMD] is not.

Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger (via CRN)

Interestingly, Pat states that the new hybrid model introduced on Alder Lake CPUs which includes P-Core for performance and E-Core for efficiency will allow them to secure leadership in both the performance and efficiency segments and states that this will be a game-changer for the industry as their competition (AMD) can’t tackle them on both fronts. This is definitely up for debate as the red team is going to launch its Zen 4 CPUs next year and Intel has been unable to beat Zen 3 until now in both performance and efficiency departments. So all the lead Intel secures with Alder Lake might diminish when Zen 4 comes out unless they got a new chip in design (which they have in the form of Raptor Lake).

I think we’re in a supply-constrained environment, so in that view, I don’t think there’s a lot more opportunity for share movements one way or the other in this period of time. I see it as a fairly stable environment in terms of market share and ASPs in that environment.

And if anything, ASPs are rising, not falling because of supply constraints and the costs of the supply chain coming at us and at [AMD] in this period of time. In that sense, I just don’t see a lot of change on market share, which in some respects, as our products are rebuilding strength, we’ll be in an environment where as the products get better as they ramp, and as we look out [two to] three years, we expect unquestioned leadership products in every dimension that we participate in.

So this period of time when people could say, “Hey, [AMD] is leading,” that’s over. We are back with a very defined view of what it requires to be leadership in every dimension: leadership product, leadership [chip] packaging, leadership process, leadership software, unquestioned leadership on critical new workloads like AI, graphics, media, power-performance, enabling again the ecosystem. This is what we will be doing with aggressive actions and programs over the next couple of years.

Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger (via CRN)

Pat also states that the current market conditions make it seem like AMD might be leading but they still control over 80% of the server market share and that’s with a supply-constrained environment. According to Intel, once Sapphire Rapids is out and Ice Lake ramps up, the market share will return to them.