Although both AMD and Intel are descendants of Fairchild Semiconductor, the main difference between the two companies is that Intel has much stronger revenue streams and higher R&D budgets. That financial advantage, along with the efficiency and sophistication of Intel’s chips, has often left AMD struggling to compete.
Having supplied the microprocessors for IBM’s first personal computer in 1981, Intel cemented its position in the following decades, becoming a multi-billion dollar behemoth and the undisputed CPU market leader. Their dominance has even led to accusations of industry monopolization, resulting in hefty fines and lawsuit settlements.
AMD managed to innovate and started to compete with Intel despite these challenges, and their CPUs shared enough parallels that both AMD and Intel chips suffered from the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities.
But by the early 2010s, AMD had fallen so far behind that they were forced back to the drawing board. Recognizing the difficulty of competing with Intel, their new strategy focused on budget chips, where performance aligned with price.
That led to an ingenious design approach that could be easily scaled, along with an emphasis on chiplets to reduce waste. Before long, AMD was putting out chips with power comparable to that of Intel’s, but at the same lower price as before. As the performance gap closed, the cheaper option began to make more sense for mid-market consumers.
The 2017 launch of AMD’s Zen architecture changed the situation drastically, and today that architecture threatens Intel’s supremacy more seriously than ever before. While AMD still can’t match Intel’s single-thread speeds, the number of cores and multi-thread capabilities of its chips means increased clock speeds and greater efficiency.