Competitors

In PC / Laptop Space:

As a manufacturer of microprocessors, Intel’s fiercest competitor is AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). In a way, Intel has been partly defined by this intense rivalry which has been a key driver for the technological advancements that it has made over the past decade - a period of immense growth in the general computing and semiconductor industry.

Both Intel and AMD were founded in the Silicon Valley, USA – Intel was founded in 1968 and AMD started a year later in 1969. They were competitors right from the start in the manufacturing of PC and server microprocessors or Central Processing Units (CPUs) which quickly became a hot commodity within a short period of time. One only needs to consider the sheer and ever-increasing number of electronic devices around the world, each requiring a CPU, to grasp the immensity of demand for microprocessors.

The competition between Intel and AMD intensified especially during the 1990s and early 2000s with both companies competing aggressively on processor speed, pricing and even naming rights. The "x86" CPU variant for one was a technical nomenclature over which Intel and AMD competed fiercely upon, even resulting in several lawsuits filed between the two companies.

Intel eventually won the upper hand over AMD by means of clever marketing. Its “Intel Inside” campaign was an unprecedented marketing effort which cost Intel millions of dollars. Intel concentrated on pushing its CPUs to PC manufacturers and reimbursed them for featuring Intel CPUs in the PCs they manufactured. This initiative was so successful that eventually consumers began to only trust PCs which sported “Intel Inside” stickers. Today, Intel is the default standard for any PC and laptop on the market - consumers often take for granted or expect that that Intel chips will be installed in the gizmos they purchase.

At present, Intel controls upwards of 65% of the total CPU market while AMD's market share is 22%. Intel has become a household brand for the mass consumer market. Intel is also the default choice for data-center servers with its Xeon line of high powered and high durability CPUs. The company's market share is a dominant 90% of the whole world's server market.

Intel's competitor, AMD, has moved into a more specialized CPU market segment – PC gaming. As its general CPU market share plummeted against Intel, AMD shifted its focus onto gaming PC manufacturers like Alienware in order to stay in the game. AMD subsequently optimized its CPUs to run single-threaded applications (typically video games) better than Intel’s CPUs which were more optimized for everyday multi-tasking operations (e.g. having 5 Internet browsers, 1 PowerPoint and 2 Excel applications at the same time) In 2006, AMD acquired advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturing giant ATI. This move further strengthened AMD’s position in the PC gaming and advanced 3D graphics segment market. Finally in 2013, with the emergence of the high growth console gaming market, AMD announced a unified gaming strategy to drive the gaming market across all computing platforms. This strategy has yielded dividends, with AMD registering a 165% annual growth in 2013. This was mainly attributable to sales driven by the PS4 and Xbox One gaming consoles which utilize AMD CPUs and the advanced computer graphics segment.

In the fast-changing world of the PC/Laptop market however, not all is rosy for Intel. As the world moves rapidly into mobile computing applications like tablets and smartphones, PC revenues in recent years have steadily declined. As a consequence, Intel has begun to set its sights on higher growth markets such as mobile and gaming – in both PC and console applications. Intel has stepped up its efforts in recent years to debunk the notion that AMD CPUs are better for gaming. Neutral PC enthusiasts and critics have begun to endorse certain models of Intel CPUs as more powerful (albeit more expensive) alternatives against AMD CPUs, effectively placing Intel in the “high performance, high price” sub-segment of the PC gaming market where there was no competition for AMD before. We expect that the future will hold more than a few of such "one-ups" between these two giants. This long-standing rivalry is far from over.