Intel and AMD live a commercial competition, in the field of microprocessors, which has lasted for 40 years well. In the past, AMD, thanks to reduced selling price compared to the competition, managed to gain precious ground against Intel, compelling the company to a condition of maximum defensive.
Until a few years ago, PCs and notebooks with AMD were much more common now, even in the supermarket shelves. Even the company “Advanced Micro Devices” starred in some resounding successes such as the launch of the first 64-bit processor technology in history, the AMD Athlon 64 that thrived in the area.
The historical curiosity
Many AMD processors were famous for their great ability to undergo operations of overclocking, the operation that allows a processor to operate at higher frequencies than the factory, speeding up the performance of the machine.
Unfortunately for AMD was only a matter of time and the years of twilight were not long in coming, mainly because of the rise of multi-core technology, which Intel began immediately to be a leader.
You may be interested to read another article on LifeStyleQA: Intel RealSense, digital cameras with 3D
Today with the launch of Intel’s sixth generation CPU market is almost monopolized by the company and computers for sale, fixed or portable, have almost always processor with this brand. The counts of AMD are in deep red, so registering 26% sales drop compared to the same period last year.
The reality is that management and production costs, to support the comparison with the giant Intel, AMD is getting heavier and can no longer support them. To save AMD, for the moment it remains only the Thin Client industry (53% market share), machines without memory, used mainly in business contexts for cloud applications or servers.
We have summarized, in 4 points, the motives of the involution of AMD processors:
- Costs: Multi-core CPU production is increasingly expensive, about three times that required in the early 2000;
- Performance: Intel CPUs with the same power are superior in reliability and performance. The only real reason to choose Intel today remained the savings;
- Innovations: From the past AMD cannot propose and dusting novelty or patents, inexorably pulled in frequency from INTEL;
- Energy: AMD has to work on a number of fronts, from 2005 has in fact acquired ATI graphics card market. Manage men, projects and resources on two such important and strategic sectors is really complicated.
You may be interested to read another article on LifeStyleQA: The PC market continued its free fall in 2015
Will AMD to recover, collocation at the top of the market and win back customers passed meanwhile to Intel? With some sacrifices (sale of GPU sector?) and some good ideas – there is much anticipation for the architecture AMD Zen, due in 2016 – gates of nanotechnology are always open. Unfortunately you will need to make heavy investments and this will need a lot of money. We, in our own small way, we cheer for the American company headquartered in Sunnyvale.
Leave a Reply