Well, 2019 finished with Intel as king of the chip world, Broadcom doing OK, everyone else shrinking. Good thing 2020's looking up, eh?

Intel and Broadcom were the lone beacons of success in an otherwise dismal semiconductor market last year, according to industry analysts at Omdia (formerly IHS Markit). While the semi industry as a whole shrunk by 11.7 per cent, revenue-wise, in 2019, Chipzilla expanded its cash intake by 1.3 per cent, year on year. According …

[Dan 55]

This is why we have analysts

They can sort a table by the income column in Excel and not mention anything about the wheels falling off Intel's dinosaur architecture and AMD trouncing them practically any way you care to measure it.

[big_D]

Re: This is why we have analysts

Except that it was the semi-conductor, not the CPU business. AMD sold off Global Foundries years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is why we have analysts

It would be interesting to see a similar report focused on CPUs.

[Pascal Monett]

Except one : sales.

[diodesign]

Re: This is why we have analysts

AMD didn't make the top 10 with 2019 revenues of $6.7bn. Tenth place was Infineon with $8.9bn.

We all want AMD to succeed, but it's still generating <10% of Intel's annual revenue.

C.

[Boothy]

Re: This is why we have analysts

Quote: "AMD didn't make the top 10 with 2019 revenues of $6.7bn. Tenth place was Infineon with $8.9bn."

Be interesting to see how things play out with AMD over the next couple of years. Forbes predictions (pinch of salt, and before the world stopped!) in Feb, were for AMD to hit $8.76b this year, and $10.51b next year.

AMD seem to be absolutely dominating Intel with CPUs, at least in specs if not revenue, with their Zen 2 on TSMCs 7nm node (used in current Ryzen, Threadripper & Epyc).

AMDs new mobile Ryzen 4000 range just launched this week, and seem to be much faster in almost everything compared to an equivalent Intel CPUs, despite using much less power (a 35W AMD CPU being ~40% faster overall than a current mobile 45W Intel CPU (this was real-world benchmarks, not 'on paper', and was against the 2nd fastest AMD chip, as the fastest one hasn't been released yet!)). AMD are also getting good backing from people like ASUS this time, in making premium AMD laptops, gaming laptops etc. rather than just the budget ones we've been used to.

It seems currently, if you want a powerful PC or Laptop, especially for productivity or gaming, you buy AMD, not Intel.

About the only use-case for Intel > AMD in PCs, is for gaming, and even then it's only for a few specific titles, and only if you are buying a top end CPU.

Plus of course the new consoles come out this year from MS and Sony, which will sell millions at Christmas, are basically both being run on a custom AMD Ryzen CPU + GPU, the CPU in both platforms being in essence an undeclocked Ryzen 3700, and the GPU using the new RDNA 2 architecture from AMD, which has been confirmed as similar in performance (in the console version) as a current nVidia RTX 2080.

RDNA 2 will also be released on PC GFX cards at some point either late this year, or early next year, and this time round, it's expected to be able to compete directly with current top end nVidia cards like the 2080Ti, so should help boost sales there as well.

Plus finally, AMD have said Zen 3 is being launched later in the year, and that this will be on an improved 7nm node from TSMC, so should both clocked faster and use less power than Zen 2.

[Steve Todd]

So the caption should be ...

All but two of the top ten chip designers (Intel and Broadcom) suffer shrinking revenues?

[Smartypantz]

Consequences

Cloud computing means massive sharing of resources (and massive loss of control). When there is a massive shift towards massive sharing of resources. the result is:..... A massive drop in demand for resources. What a shock, who would have thunk it??