Skip to main content

Intel CEO: Alder Lake has left AMD in the rearview mirror

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger believes the chip giant has regained its leading position in the CPU market, with the executive referring to AMD as a competitor “in the rearview mirror.”

Gelsinger made the remark during a video where he reflects on his time at the company since being made CEO in January 2021.

Intel Alder Lake pin layout.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

He states that AMD, which made the ongoing battle between Team Blue and Team Red extremely competitive during 2021, is currently trailing Intel in regard to the consumer market. Gelsinger also firmly states that AMD will never regain its industry-leading position again.

“Alder Lake. All of a sudden … Boom! We are back in the game,” Gelsinger said, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. “AMD in the rearview mirror in clients [consumer market], and never again will they be in the windshield; we are just leading the market.”

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Alder Lake did indeed propel Intel back into the conversation again as a force to be reckoned with. The 12th-generation processors immediately became some of the best gaming CPUs on the market upon its October launch last year.

Alder Lake silicon utilizes a hybrid architecture that makes use of both Golden Cove high-performance cores and Gracemont power-efficient cores. The technology has allowed Alder Lake chips to outperform the very best in terms of technical performance. For example, the Intel Core i7-12800H CPU outperformed Apple’s impressive M1 Max in a benchmark last month.

Even midrange non-K Intel Alder Lake processors are showcasing impressive clock speeds when overclocked. Intel is also preparing to launch its latest chips for laptops in the coming months, with Geekbench tests indicating the upcoming Alder Lake-P chips outperforming previous generations by over 30%.

Elsewhere, the Core i7-12700H processor was found to be 47% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX chip in multi-core operations.

Of course, AMD is set to launch its answer to Alder Lake in the form of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors based on its Zen 4 architecture, which will represent the first time stock AMD desktop processors run at 5GHz. Team Red’s 3D VCache technology is also set to make its debut on the company’s desktop silicon.

At the start of 2021, AMD surpassed Intel in desktop CPU market share for the first time in 15 years. We’ll have to wait for Alder Lake’s laptop release and the launch of Ryzen 7000 processors to see which company comes out on top in terms of market share in 2022. Either way, the consumer market will ultimately benefit from these exciting new chips powering the latest systems.

Editors' Recommendations

Zak Islam
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Zak Islam was a freelance writer at Digital Trends covering the latest news in the technology world, particularly the…
I’ve used Intel CPUs for years. Here’s why I’m finally switching to AMD
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D held between fingertips.

I've been using Intel CPUs for close to seven years. It started with the Core i7-8700K, but I moved on to the Core i9-10900K, Core i9-12900K, and most recently, the Core i9-13900K, all of which could have occupied a slot among the best processors at different points in time. But after so much time with Team Blue, I'm switching back to AMD.

It comes at an interesting time for Intel and the PC hardware community as a whole, which is currently abuzz about a particular article claiming that Intel is objectively "better" for PC gamers. That's not what this article is. Instead, I want to walk you through why I chose to use AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D in my gaming PC, and how I came to the decision.
Stability struggles
The Intel Core i9-13900K CPU Jacob Roach / Digital Trends / Digital Trends

Read more
AMD’s next-gen CPUs are much closer than we thought
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D held between fingertips.

We already knew that AMD would launch its Zen 5 CPUs this year, but recent motherboard updates hint that a release is imminent. Both MSI and Asus have released updates for their 600-series motherboards that explicitly add support for "next-generation AMD Ryzen processors," setting the stage for AMD's next-gen CPUs.

This saga started a few days ago when hardware leaker 9550pro spotted an MSI BIOS update, which they shared on X (formerly Twitter). Since then, Asus has followed suit with BIOS updates of its own featuring a new AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) -- the firmware responsible for starting the CPU -- that brings support for next-gen CPUs (spotted by VideoCardz).

Read more
It just became the perfect time to buy a last-gen Intel CPU
Intel Core i9-13900K held between fingertips.

In a surprising twist, Intel has just decided to discontinue its entire lineup of 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs, and it's happening faster than anyone might have expected. Who would have thought that Intel would bid farewell to some of its best processors so soon? While today is a sad day for Raptor Lake, the news is good for those wanting to buy a CPU -- while supplies last, that is.

The discontinuance applies to Intel's lineup of overclockable Raptor Lake processors, bar the 14th-gen refresh, of course. This means that CPUs like the Core i5-13600K are no longer in production and vendors will no longer be able to restock them as of May 24, 2024. This comes from an official product change notification document from Intel, which was spotted by Tom's Hardware. The full list of affected processors is as follows:

Read more