There is a lot going on at Intel. The chip company appears to be losing ground against AMD in the server market, while it has had to abandon its acquisition of Israel’s Tower Semiconductor due to Chinese regulators. Still, it is not all doom and gloom: as far as consumer PCs are concerned, it has briefly held off AMD’s years-long advance.
Research by Mercury Research does show Intel to be by far the front-runner if we put all x86 chips together: 68.4 percent market share versus AMD’s 31.6 percent. When it comes just to SoCs and IoT devices, Intel leads even more: 82.6 percent versus AMD with 17.4 percent.
When it comes to CPUs for servers, workstations, desktops and laptops, Intel has had virtually no competition for years. AMD, however, has been steadily catching up since the launch of the Ryzen architecture in 2017, increasingly rivaling Intel on performance.
However, absolute growth for data centers
In the second quarter, both Intel and AMD sold more data center processors than previously, Mercury analyst Dean McCarron tells CRN. The reason Intel lost market share, according to McCarron, was because fewer Intel Xeon chips were being delivered and CPUs intended for networking and storage.
Intel must abandon Tower
It was also revealed today that the acquisition of Tower Semiconductor will not go through. Intel had offered $5.4 billion (4.95 billion euros) to increase its chip production capacity. When the deal closed early last year, Tower promised to strengthen Intel’s competitive position against TSMC. The deal is officially cancelled because of objections from the Chinese government, which may have done so to curtail the U.S. company’s chip plans. CEO Pat Gelsinger was still in China last month to see if the acquisition could get approval from Beijing.
However, Intel does still appear to be investing heavily in Israel, but solely for a chip factory. It also has plans for European factories in Poland and Germany, in addition to a giant “fab” in Arizona, USA.
Also read: Intel to build 22.9 billion euro chip factory in Israel
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