At the 2024 Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference two days ago, Intel and AMD jointly announced the formation of an X86 ecosystem advisory group to jointly defend the X86 ecosystem.
At the meeting, Intel CEO Pat · Gelsinger also took a photo with AMD Chairman and CEO Lisa Su in the same frame, and said, "We agree that now is the best time to cooperate." ”
After a brief understanding, the members of the X86 ecosystem advisory group include Dell, Google, Lenovo, HP, Meta, Microsoft and other leading manufacturers.
According to the introduction, the mission of the advisory group is: to bring together industry leaders to drive developer innovation through a more unified instruction set and architectural interface; Improve the compatibility, predictability, and consistency between x86 products, and promote the creation of unified and compatible key x86 architecture features and programming models; Spanning all fields such as data center, cloud, client, edge, and embedded.
Expected outcomes of this collaboration include:
Provide customers with more choice and greater compatibility in hardware and software, so that they can benefit from the new cutting-edge features faster;
Simplified architecture guidelines to improve software consistency and interface performance for Intel, AMD x86 product families;
Enable new capabilities to be more widely and efficiently integrated into operating systems, frameworks, and applications.
You must know that AMD and Intel have been fiercely competitive in the CPU, GPU and server markets over the years. According to the official statement, the two sides will jointly focus on the ecological construction of the X86 architecture.
In other words, Intel and AMD are working on an unprecedented collaboration, and I'm looking forward to it~
As for the reason for Intel and AMD's "ice-breaking cooperation", it is speculated that it may be related to the pressure brought by Arm.
It is understood that the current processor architecture is mainly divided into X86 and Arm, of which the X86 architecture has a fairly high share and status in the PC field, and the main manufacturers are also Intel and AMD.
According to the data, as of the third quarter of 2024, Intel's x86 processing market share is 63%, while AMD accounts for 33%.
Arm was previously used in low-power devices such as phones and tablets. In recent years, the direction of the wind has suddenly changed... Apple, Qualcomm and Google are all launching PCs with Arm-based processors.
MacBooks and iMacs with Apple's M-series chips, Google's Chromebooks, and the Copilot+ PC launched by Qualcomm and Microsoft.
After these large manufacturers have adopted the Arm architecture, Arm's market share has also ushered in a significant increase. In stark contrast, the sales of X86 architecture PCs are declining year by year.
From this point of view, it is not for nothing that Intel and AMD feel that the crisis is unfounded
Especially for Intel, its second-quarter financial report in early August showed that it announced a global layoff of 15% of employees, cut capital expenditures and suspended quarterly dividends, and its stock price plummeted by more than 21% in a single day, and the stock price fell by about 53% in 2024.
Some time ago, a topic of "Qualcomm was revealed to be interested in acquiring Intel" rushed to the hot search list, causing a large number of netizens to discuss.
Although based on multiple perspectives, the rumor that "Qualcomm intends to acquire Intel" may be difficult to achieve in a short period of time. However, on the day of this news, Intel's stock price closed up 3.3%...
To put it simply, the main reason that Intel and AMD can get rid of their past suspicions is profit. Whether the competition between Arm and X86 can lead to lower power consumption, high performance and cost-effective processors is perhaps what consumers are most concerned about.