Chapter 31 Section 4 The relationship between Intel and AMD

We used the phrase "the battle between Intel and Motorola" when we mentioned Motorola earlier, because it was indeed a very dangerous war for Intel. At that time, Motorola was slightly superior in terms of technology and financial resources.If Intel had made one wrong move, it wouldn't exist today.The battle between Intel and many RISC companies can be said to be without danger, because Intel already has internal strength and external support.And today, the competition between Intel and AMD for the market I personally don't think is a contest between heavyweight rivals, so it's not really a war.I think that if it were not for the constraints of the anti-monopoly law, Intel would probably have defeated or acquired AMD.In addition, the relationship between Intel and AMD is basically both alliance and struggle.

AMD is different from Intel's previous opponents. It has never reinvented itself to make a chip different from Intel, but has continuously introduced cheaper alternatives that are compatible with Intel. This practice of AMD has a lot to do with its genes. In terms of blood, AMD should be Intel's younger brother, because it was also separated from Fairchild Semiconductor, and it is also in Silicon Valley, only a few years later than Intel, and like Intel, it started from semiconductor memory.Unlike other processor companies, the founders of AMD were born in sales, while the founders of general technology companies are all born in technology. This gene of AMD determines that it does not do what it can do, but is market-oriented and does what the market needs.Not long after AMD was created, it successfully dissected an eight-bit processor chip from Intel.In the 1980s, due to the principle of IBM's procurement that more than two companies must participate in the bidding, for a long time, Intel took the initiative to ask AMD to help it produce chips and sell them to IBM and other companies.

In 1986, Intel didn't want AMD to produce the 80386 that had just come out. Maybe it wanted to monopolize the profits of 80386, so it began to break the contract. AMD took out the past contract and requested arbitration. The result of the arbitration was that AMD could produce 80386.Now Intel quit and appealed to the California Superior Court. This lawsuit has been fought for several years, but the court basically upheld the result of the arbitration. AMD then justifiably cloned Intel's processor chips.At that time, microcomputer manufacturers, such as Compaq, began to purchase AMD chips in small quantities in order to lower prices with Intel.A few years later, Intel once again accused AMD of misappropriating the MMX technology for multimedia processing that it spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy, and AMD made concessions to reach a settlement.Throughout the 1990s, although Intel and AMD were squabbling, they had the same interests in developing the x86 market and fighting against workstation chips with reduced instruction sets.Therefore, they are more dependent on the market than competition.

Two thousand years later, the U.S. economy entered a trough, and the market for workstations with simplified instructions plummeted, and the stock of Sun Corporation fell by more than 90%.Looking at the processor market, it is dominated by Intel and AMD. AMD took the initiative this time, taking advantage of its early development of 64-bit processors, took the lead in challenging Intel in the high-end market, and won a large share of the server market in one fell swoop.A few years ago, because Microsoft was unable to launch the new operating system Vista, individual users had no motivation to update their computers; at the same time, due to the development of the Internet, the network server market grew rapidly, and the demand for 64-bit high-end processor chips increased greatly. .In this way, in the past few years, AMD's performance has continued to rise, once occupying about 40% of the processor market, and provoked a price war with Intel. AMD is suing Intel's monopolistic behavior in various parts of the world at the same time.By the beginning of last year, AMD not only reached its peak in performance, but also gained a lot in the anti-monopoly lawsuit against Intel, and the European Union and other countries began to restrain Intel.In this way, Intel cannot underestimate the little brother AMD.It decided to give AMD some color to look at.In the following year, Intel's long-awaited Core Duo processor finally came out, with higher performance than AMD's similar products, and Intel regained its leading position in products.At the same time, Intel has moved production lines to Oregon and Arizona, which are much cheaper than Silicon Valley, to reduce costs in the past few years. Then, Intel began to respond to the price war.As a result of the price war, Intel's profit margins have been affected somewhat, but AMD has gone from profitable to substantial losses.Intel regained the initiative in the processor market.Now, both are using 65-nanometer semiconductor technology.In the next few years, Intel will maintain an absolute advantage over AMD because it is clearly ahead of AMD in the latest 45nm technology and has begun to develop more integrated 32nm chips.

I don't think Intel is trying to kill AMD outright, generally speaking.Because keeping AMD will do it more good than harm.First, it avoids a lot of the hassle of antitrust.Today, AMD's stock value is only 5% of Intel's, and the latter's cash in hand is enough to buy the former.However, Intel cannot do this, otherwise there will be big trouble with antitrust.Second, keeping AMD as an opponent is good for Intel's own technological progress.Liu Zongyuan pointed out in his article "Admonition to the Enemy" that "Qin has six kingdoms, and it is strong with trepidation; once the six kingdoms are eliminated, they will perish."This rule also applies to Intel.From 1979 to the present, Intel has increased the processor speed (if measured in decimal operation speed) by 250,000 times.It couldn't have done that without a host of competitors.Now its main opponent is only AMD. From the perspective of motivating itself, it may be necessary to keep it. After all, AMD is not technically a headache for Intel like Motorola and IBM were.There is such a joke that people from Intel met AMD's counterparts one day and said, when will your new processor be made, and we will have new things to do when you make it.