As is often said in these cases: “there is more tension than Frodo in a jewelry store.” And it is that the tone is rising between Intel and AMD, where the first to launch the dart were the blue ones. Now AMD has responded indirectly using the example of Intel attacking with a most picturesque simile. Why this escalation of statements? The answer has shifted from PCs to servers and… Is Intel vs. AMD a knife in a gunfight?
Between AMD and Intel there is a war, a price war, a war for performance and above all a war for servers, a sector as complicated as it is lucrative where the former is stealing share from the latter. With this approach, a series of statements are being launched, each one more insightful, which shows the tension that reigns in processors today.
From “AMD is in the rearview mirror” to phone booths
It was the CEO of Intel who was the first to fire, declaring (correctly) that his company had long been behind AMD and that with the launch of Alder Lake it was now AMD that was in the rearview mirror. That is true to such an extent that the red team are lowering prices to compete while waiting for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and to evaluate if they launch processors with more cores with V-Cache, mainly because Zen 4 will be delayed a few months and they cannot compete with Intel in performance.
This pretext and the null responses from AMD to such a statement by Gelsinger seem to have triggered another event of the same nature, since the CEO of Intel attacked again with another simile yesterday:
The fight between Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC is akin to a knife fight inside a phone booth.
AMD has not made an official statement on this through Lisa Su, but someone from the company has put a little more spice by adding a crossover of statements.
AMD vs Intel: the knife in a shootout
It has been David Melendrez, account manager for Dell at AMD, who on Linkedin has shown his particular point of view on what Gelsinger exposed.
The answer was none other than:
Let him bring a knife to a shootout
This shows that Intel’s problem is greater than they want to show because for Melendrez Intel is not “well armed” to compete with its Xeon to EPYC processors. And he may not be wrong, mainly because Sapphire Rapids will not have the same number of total threads as the new EPYC Milan-X and also the Intel platform suffers from delays as we reported two months ago.
As reported by the investment bank Keybanc AMD will grow in its global share of servers above 20% in 2022, which is to be expected by Lisa Su as she herself teased almost a year ago. Therefore, the reds will recover more ground and the launch of Genoa by the end of the year can be defining in this fight, because 2023 will be a totally new terrain where Intel will have to compete with a new architecture that we still do not know if it will be homogeneous or heterogeneous.
