Intel CEO: Alder Lake left AMD in the rearview mirror

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger believes the chip giant has regained its leadership position in the processor market, with the executive calling AMD a competitor “in the rearview mirror”.

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

He says AMD, which made the ongoing battle between Team Blue and Team Red extremely competitive in 2021, currently lags behind Intel when it comes to the mainstream market. Gelsinger also firmly states that AMD will never regain its position as industry leader.

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

Alder Lake has indeed propelled Intel back into the conversation as a force to be reckoned with. The 12th Gen processors immediately became one of the best gaming processors on the market when it launched in October last year.

Alder Lake’s silicon uses a hybrid architecture that uses both high-performance Golden Cove cores and power-efficient Gracemont cores. Technology has allowed Alder Lake chips to surpass the best in terms of technical performance. For example, the Intel Core i7-12800H processor outperformed Apple’s impressive M1 Max in a benchmark last month.

Even midrange non-K Intel Alder Lake CPUs show impressive clock speeds when overclocked. Intel is also gearing up to launch its latest laptop chips in the coming months, with Geekbench testing indicating the upcoming Alder Lake-P chips will outperform previous generations by more than 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 response to Alder Lake in the form of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors based on its Zen 4 architecture, which will represent AMD’s first desktop processors running at 5GHz. Team Red’s 3D VCache technology is also set to debut on the company’s desktop silicon.

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