It's interesting how Intel has been surviving in smaller and smaller market niches these days:
- cheap ULV chips like N100, N150, N300
- ultrabook ULV chips (I hope Lunar Lake is not a fluke)
- workstation chips that aren't too powerful (mainstream Core CPUs)
- inexpensive GPUs (a surprising niche, but excruciatingly small)
AMD has been dominating them in all other submarkets.
Without a mainstream halo product Intel has been forced to compete on price, which is not something they can afford. They have to make a product that leapfrogs either AMD or Nvidia and successfully (and meaningfully) iterate on it. The last time they tried something like that was in 2021 with the launch of Alder Lake, but AMD overtook them with 3D V-Cache in 2022.
Without a mainstream halo product Intel has been forced to compete on price, which is not something they can afford. They have to make a product that leapfrogs either AMD or Nvidia and successfully (and meaningfully) iterate on it. The last time they tried something like that was in 2021 with the launch of Alder Lake, but AMD overtook them with 3D V-Cache in 2022.