AMD Shows Off Impressive Mobile Processors and Epyc Server Chips
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Intel has taken flak in the past year, while AMD has been redeemed.
Still, Intel absolutely dominates the data center market, and its fab capacity is increasingly important due to the semiconductor shortage we are seeing as WFH becomes the norm and major automakers plunge head-first into mainstream EV projects.
AMD is awesome, but Intel 10th Gen and 11th Gen processors are still the cat's meow at the upper end of the notebook market. XPS13 uses Intel 11th Gen. MBP13 uses Intel 10th Gen. X1CG9 will use Intel 11th Gen.
There's a major lag time where the business community doesn't understand what's happening in the engineering side of the semiconductor industry. Research analysts and traders pay more attention to operating profit and other high-inertia metrics than the technology itself.
That's why AMD was trading $2 in 2016, and that's why INTC stock is down over 20% since January 2020 despite the massive shift to WFH and teleconferencing.
I personally think both companies are amazing. Their innovations have fostered inordinate amounts of human advancement relative to the profit that they have generated.
Your point seems to be that Intel's market dominance has not recently been marked by any watershed moments. I have to say, it's a fair point and I'm not in disagreement, but I also suggest that Intel is responsible for more than "tiny advancements."
In the larger context, we should be careful not to punish Intel for biting off more than it could chew. 10nm was a disaster, and 7nm is going to be late to the party. In my view, thermal waste is a major problem even for Intel's newest consumer-oriented x86 processors. However, Intel has thrown big money at every possible path to advancement for the sector as a whole. Computer vision for self-driving cars? They bought Mobileye. FPGAs? They bought Altera. Sure, many of their endeavors end in failure or spinoff, but there's certainly something special about a company that is willing to design AND fabricate any form of semiconductor technology that appears on the horizon.