Intel Dubs AMD 'Formidable' in Leaked Post
A competitive profile of AMD from an internal Intel employee website has leaked onto Reddit. The story, entitled "AMD competitive profile: Where we go-toe-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs," was posted by Reddit user scv_good_to_go as a large screenshot said to be the original article.
An Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware that the company doesn't comment on internal employee communications.
The posted document is a look at AMD's rising position in the market and the challenges Intel faces in combating the company. As one may expect from an internal site, it is largely positive about Intel's outlook. But it also mentions a number of issues the company is faces.
It points out AMD's recent stock performance, a point-by-point list of threats from AMD (especially on high-end products) and the challenges AMD's Matisse architecture poses against Intel's 9th Gen Core processors in terms of multi-threaded content creation workloads, as well as the ability for Intel Xeon CPUs to compete with AMD's EPYC Rome in the server market.
The screenshot also details what Intel considers its "six pillars of innovation — process architecture, memory, interconnect, security and software," to be a "secret sauce." Specifically, the company highlights its software code contributions (and that Intel has 15,000 software developers, more people on a team than AMD has employees), a focus on reinvigorating the laptop with Project Athena and that Intel also covers memory, Wi-Fi, Thunderbolt and other parts of devices.
Additionally, the post has a Q&A with Steven Collins, director of Intel's Data-centric Competitive Assessment Group. It focuses on pricing, the benefits AMD gets from using TSMC.
The screenshot shows Collins suggesting that "it's clearly a challenging time," but suggests a strong strategy and roadmap is keeping the company on track. But he also acknowledges that execution, both on process technology nodes or the products that work with them, needs to be whipped into shape,and that the company will want to increase its differentiation with software.
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You can read the whole story on the Reddit post, here. There isn't really any new information or brand new announcements, but it's an inside look at the company's mindset right now as it faces challenges that it hasn't seen in years.
Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.
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joeblowsmynose "Security" ... as one of Intel's six pillars of innovation? That's pretty funny right there :)Reply
Edit: well they did just poach an AMD guy to head up processor security, maybe their paper was forward looking? -
bit_user the company will want to increase its differentiation with software
I hope this doesn't lead to more balkanization. Nobody wants different software stacks for Intel and AMD, aside from obvious things like device drivers.