Can Intel, which was deprecated by Apple, "return to glory"? Perhaps the chip battle goes far beyond that

Apple and Intel are once again getting us excited about PC chips.

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Author | Li Yangxia

In February, Intel welcomed a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who plans to bring the chipmaker giant back to its former glory. So can the new CEO really bring LinkedIn Terre back?

Pat Gelsinger's plan to save Intel includes speeding up Intel's manufacturing process, spending more than $200 billion to build a new chip factory, and producing chips for other companies. If it goes according to plan, it will take 2025 to surpass chip manufacturing competitors.

At the same time, Apple launched Mac computers with their own powerful new processors, which challenged Intel's plans. In the chip field, in addition to Apple and Intel, there are also chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD, which also makes the tech community excited enough this year.

In the 50 years since Intel introduced the 4004 in 1971, the speed of the processor has steadily increased, so it is widely used.

But as consoles and cars became more popular, PCs were almost gradually abandoned. A laptop from five years ago is similar to a laptop from a year ago, with minor tweaks to the processor and software. On the contrary, the iteration of the update on the mobile communication device mobile phone is more obvious.

Intel once defined cutting-edge chip technology, but has been working to improve its manufacturing process for five years. New Intel core chips are often tweaks to existing designs or models limited to narrow markets such as ultralight laptops. Rival AMD has leveraged TSMC's more advanced chip manufacturing technology to succeed in high-end PCs such as gaming platforms.

It is reported that Qualcomm, which has strong strength in the field of mobile phones, is also trying to enter the CPU field of personal computers. In January, Qualcomm acquired chip design company Nuvia, a move that may allow Qualcomm to launch faster PCs in 2023.

Another chip giant, Nvidia, is lucrative in graphics and artificial intelligence, but its chips aren't as big an impact on PCs as the new CPU made by Intel and Apple. But it intends to acquire Arm, which licenses all the technology used by smartphone processors, for $40 billion. That caused resentment among his rivals and regulators, and in December, Nvidia was sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to block the acquisition of Arm.

Faced with so many competitors, Intel's Alder Lake chips (officially known as 12th-generation core processors) made some progress in 2021. The new chip takes a method that phones have used for years, combining a fast-performance core that performs heavy tasks with a slower, more efficient kernel that handles background tasks. Currently, Alder Lake chips are only used in desktop computers. But they will be used on laptops in early 2022, freeing Intel from its reliance on older production methods.

Intel's efforts at this time may be too late in Apple's eyes. Because Apple has removed Intel from its product line in favor of its own M1 design. In 2021, Apple demonstrated with the M1 Pro and M1 Max that its chips are also capable of powering the MacBook Pro.

The high-end M1 chip adds more processing cores, graphics, and memory to users such as video editors and programmers, dispelling many concerns about the performance of Intel chips.

Apple chips don't appear in Windows laptops, so most people who use PCs still need Intel or AMD chips. But Apple's success should drive the mac's competition with Windows PCs in the coming years.

At the same time, the chip industry, which is always looking for new ways, has new ways to challenge giants such as Intel, Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia for the benefit of consumers and data center operators.

Chipmakers are building the world's largest processors to advance AI technology. Google has its own Arm series chip Tensor, bringing its AI expertise to its Pixel 6 phones. The RISC-V international alliance also owns dozens of companies like Alibaba and SiFive, which are working on a cheaper alternative than Arm design.

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