Intel's problems continue: AMD erodes market share, credit rating downgraded, event postponed

[midian182]

The big picture: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger might be feeling like the captain of the Titanic right now, desperately trying to stop Chipzilla from sinking any further as it lurches from one crisis to another. The issues with the Raptor Lake CPUs are just the tip of the iceberg as Intel deals with a declining share in CPU markets, a class action lawsuit, poor financial results, mass layoffs, and Moody's downgrading its senior unsecured rating. It's all led to Team Blue postponing its September Innovation event until 2025.

The latest piece of news Intel could have done without comes from Mercury Research (via PC Gamer). The PC component market research group's most recent report shows that AMD's share of the desktop x86 CPU market reached 23% in the latest quarter, jumping 3.6% year-on-year, while Intel fell from 80.6% to 77%.

It was an even better yearly performance in the laptop market for AMD, where its share jumped from 16.5% in 2023 to 20.3%. But the biggest improvement was in servers, where Team Red's share went up from 18.6% to 24.1%.

Follow up story: Intel promises microcode update for crashing CPUs won't affect performance

Mercury does note that Intel's total x86 chip market share has increased, but that's only due to AMD providing its SoCs for gaming consoles, which have seen their sales, especially Xbox ones, decline as they draw near the end of their current lifecycle and upgrades such as the PS5 Pro are on the horizon.

It's likely that AMD will continue to erode more of Intel's market share in the consumer desktop arena. The issues with the 13th- and 14th-gen Raptor Lake chips have been a disaster for the firm, and we're likely to see this reflected in future sales – despite the extended warranties. Intel is still the dominant force when it comes to desktop, laptop, and server CPUS, but its lead is shrinking all the time.

Earlier this week, shareholders launched a class-action lawsuit against Intel for allegedly concealing problems within its foundry business, which resulted in the company posting weak results, laying off 15,000 people, suspending its dividend, and causing its market cap to fall by $32 billion.

Moody's long-term ratings definitions

Concerns over Intel's profitability have seen credit rating agency Moody's downgrade the company's senior unsecured rating to BAA1 from its earlier A3 rating. The unsecured ratings outlook has been changed to negative from stable. "The downgrade of the ratings reflects our expectations for Intel's significantly weaker profitability over the next 12 to 18 months," Moody's said.

Intel is undoubtedly feeling the pressure. The company has just announced that its Innovation event has been postponed from September until 2025. In a statement, Intel told PCMag: "Given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected, we are having to make some tough decisions as we continue to align our cost structure and look to assess how we rebuild a sustainable engine of process technology leadership. We express sincere appreciation to our partners, sponsors, exhibitors, developer communities and our larger team who had committed to support and attend the event."

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Intel's problems continue: AMD erodes market share, credit rating downgraded, event postponed

 

[i like foxes]

Everyone to fix their own mess

 

[noel24]

The bigger You are, the bigger the fall. Can You see It Jensen?

 

[Watzupken]

Delaying event that will showcase their Arrow Lake CPU, I did not see this coming. Unless they think there may be issues with initial batches. Credit rating downgrade(s), this is to be expected. And with credit cost running high, and lack of people investing in stocks, Intel is surely facing very strong headwinds to recover financially. Unless they score a "home run" with their Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips because they need something very urgently to turn their finances around.

 

[Lew Zealand]

And AMD has given Intel a mulligan on this one by releasing a new generation of CPUs that, while they have increased efficiency, have a smaller performance increase than we've seen for over half a decade. If Intel executes properly they will not fall far behind.

 

[Dimitriid]

Intel should go bankrupt for their years of anti consumer practices.

However the sad part is that AMD is doing their victory lap a bit too early with the super shitty 9000 series chips: price increases for basically no upgrade in performance, if all they cared about was the efficiency they should have released it as just a laptop/mobile series of products.

I think intel will keep falling back on free fall for a while while AMD starts becoming shittier and shittier with increasingly terrible new products so in the end nobody wins.

 

[HardReset]

Intel should go bankrupt for their years of anti consumer practices.

However the sad part is that AMD is doing their victory lap a bit too early with the super shitty 9000 series chips: price increases for basically no upgrade in performance, if all they cared about was the efficiency they should have released it as just a laptop/mobile series of products.

Where all this BS comes from? Doing CPU based rendering and other heavy tasks without AVX512 is just plain stupid. It's not AMDs fault. There you go: https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16

The Ryzen 7 9700X delivered 1.195x the performance of the Core i5 14600K competition or 1.15x the performance of the prior generation Ryzen 7 7700X. The Ryzen 5 9600X came in at 1.35x the performance of the Core i5 14500 and 1.25x the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X. Or if still on Zen 3 for comparison, the Ryzen 5 9600X was 1.82x the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X.

basically no upgrade in performance ""

 

[Starfals]

The bigger You are, the bigger the fall. Can You see It Jensen?

Sure, but with Intel VS AMD... at least we got AMD. With Nvidia... who else do we have? AMD is alright at best, but its not good enough to replace Nvidia. At least for my home PC. Intel is easily replaceable.

 

[wiyosaya]

Intel got themselves into this, and Intel is going to have to get themselves out of it.

Karma is a B!tch.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

Sure, but with Intel VS AMD... at least we got AMD. With Nvidia... who else do we have? AMD is alright at best, but its not good enough to replace Nvidia. At least for my home PC. Intel is easily replaceable.

Nope. This doesn't go beyond the narrative that Nvidia has implanted.

 

[p51d007]

This "problem" that intel has, you could go back and see it in other industries.
Before the "energy crisis" of the early 70's, the American automobile manufactures "the big three"
were unstoppable. Keep pumping out bigger and bigger vehicles, poor quality, but consumers bought
them. THEN, the energy "crisis". Japan and other manufacturers moved in with cheaper smaller vehicles
with better fuel mileage and kind of crushed Detroit. Recovered a bit but "the big three" have been pretty much
left in the dust.
Look at Xerox. From the late 50's, to the 80's they were the premier photocopier in the world. Heck, I even remember commercials that Xerox ran that had a competitor trying to sell their machine using the line "it's just as good as a Xerox". Then in the 80's, Sharp, Canon Ricoh and others moved in and destroyed Xerox.
Oh they still have them, but most of their sales are for high end production machines.
Intel, sat on their rear ends, pumping out pretty much the same thing year after year. Amd has been trying to innovate better chips.

When companies get too big...typically this is what happens, unfortunately.

 

[BuckarooBonzaii]

Isn't Intel part of the CHIPS Act? I suspect Intel is so deeply rooted in Government that it may get help. I won't be surprised if Intel slowly sways away from the consumer side and leans more towards the DOD as there is big/unlimited funding there.

 

[redgarl]

And AMD has given Intel a mulligan on this one by releasing a new generation of CPUs that, while they have increased efficiency, have a smaller performance increase than we've seen for over half a decade. If Intel executes properly they will not fall far behind.

Absolutely false, I am so tired of having to post the same quote from Anandtech over and over. If you had checked other reviews, you would have seen that you were missing a big part of the picture.

"Coming from our geomean averages, where we saw that the 9700X beat the 7700 by 25%, looking at our individual scores we can see that AMD has significantly improved their floating point performance across virtually the entire board. Not only does the 9700X cleanly beat the 7700 in every last test here, but no sub-test score improves by less than 10%. So based on these results, there's little reason not to expect virtually all floating point workloads to benefit similarly."

-Anandtech on Zen 5 IPC

 

[redgarl]

Intel should go bankrupt for their years of anti consumer practices.

However the sad part is that AMD is doing their victory lap a bit too early with the super shitty 9000 series chips: price increases for basically no upgrade in performance, if all they cared about was the efficiency they should have released it as just a laptop/mobile series of products.

I think intel will keep falling back on free fall for a while while AMD starts becoming shittier and shittier with increasingly terrible new products so in the end nobody wins.

Price INCREASE? Another lie, the MSRP is lower on all the 9000 series compared to the 7000 series.

 

[redgarl]

Where all this BS comes from? Doing CPU based rendering and other heavy tasks without AVX512 is just plain stupid. It's not AMDs fault. There you go: https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16


basically no upgrade in performance ""

Steve and Steve only have themselves to blame for that fiasco. They made their narrative without looking at the full picture. It is so sad to see people just getting manipulated so easily over simple videos on youtube and ending up propagating inexactitudes on social medias.

On this one, they really blew it.

 

[veLa]

Remember how exciting Alder Lake was?

 

[zamroni111]

Intel should go bankrupt for their years of anti consumer practices.

However the sad part is that AMD is doing their victory lap a bit too early with the super shitty 9000 series chips: price increases for basically no upgrade in performance, if all they cared about was the efficiency they should have released it as just a laptop/mobile series of products.

I think intel will keep falling back on free fall for a while while AMD starts becoming shittier and shittier with increasingly terrible new products so in the end nobody wins.

zen5 design focus is reduction of server cpu power consumption.
hence data center can have more servers at same power capacity

epyc price per core is twice of ryzen
therefore it's amd main focus due to higher profitability

 

[gamerk2]

Isn't Intel part of the CHIPS Act? I suspect Intel is so deeply rooted in Government that it may get help. I won't be surprised if Intel slowly sways away from the consumer side and leans more towards the DOD as there is big/unlimited funding there.

Problem is Intels chips are not at all competitive in the embedded market; PPC still holds sway here, and newer systems almost exclusively use ARM nowadays. Nevermind the majority of the toolchains are made by Xilinx...now part of the AMD family.

Fact is, Intel goofed by not going EUV for 14nm, and they have been playing catch up ever since. In addition, it's clear that Core is basically tapped out as a design, but Intel is unlikely to be working on something new. Short term...it's going to be BAD for Intel, and I wouldn't be shocked if they raise the white flag on their manufacturing wing and go toward design only, as AMD did not that long ago.

 

[Cracken]

Intel should go bankrupt for their years of anti consumer practices.

However the sad part is that AMD is doing their victory lap a bit too early with the super shitty 9000 series chips: price increases for basically no upgrade in performance, if all they cared about was the efficiency they should have released it as just a laptop/mobile series of products.

I think intel will keep falling back on free fall for a while while AMD starts becoming shittier and shittier with increasingly terrible new products so in the end nobody wins.

Bit early to call the whole 9000 series "shitty", I see another round of benches comming with revised numbers.

Anyway, the very high efficiency already showed is going to work wonders for EPYC chips, EPYC vs Xeon is where the real battle between the two are fought. Most important markets for both of them.
Here AMD keep clawing intel market share and widening the performance gab.

AMD is not in trouble. Intel is.

 

[zamroni111]

Maybe a micro code update can fix Intel business problems