Rumor has it that Intel and Nvidia conspired to block AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 series of next-generation gaming notebooks. This information was reportedly provided by an unidentified OEM and states that a secret agreement between Intel and Nvidia specifies that high-end RTX GPUs can only be paired with Intel 10th generation CPUs. Intel and Nvidia denied the allegations.
The conspiracy theory argues that Intel and Nvidia have formed an alliance to keep AMD out of the mobile gaming market by denying it access to high-end GPUs. This, in turn, would keep AMD out of the more expensive and profitable mobile market.
There are some specific reasons to think that this is not happening, but before we delve into them, let’s approach the elephant in the room. The reason conspiracy theories about AMD’s blocking the market from finding a home online is that there has been a lot of feud between the two companies over the decades. Intel went to the Supreme Court in an attempt to revoke AMD’s right to manufacture x86 CPUs. More than a decade later, AMD filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, claiming that the company abused its monopoly in the x86 market by creating a discount system that effectively blocked AMD from certain market segments. While these claims have never been evaluated in a court of law, the public opinion court had a lot to say about Intel’s behavior, and very little was good. Intel paid AMD $ 1.25 billion and renegotiated its x86 license to resolve the case, paying a fine of $ 1.45 billion to the EU.
I covered the antitrust case when it happened and conducted my own investigations into the related compiler optimization differences that were also part of the process. While, of course, ET cannot comprehensively state that there is no Intel-Nvidia agreement, there are some objective reasons to think that it does not.
Why AMD is still growing on mobile devices
So far, AMD has not put the same emphasis on mobile devices as it does on the desktop. We talked about Ryzen for desktop and Ryzen mobile as two halves of the same product, but the two faced very different competitive environments.
On the desktop, Ryzen’s story is straightforward: at launch, Ryzen punched Kaby Lake in the throat. Intel’s Core i7-8700K got its own head shot later in 2017, but from 2018-2020, Intel’s position on the desktop has continually weakened. The launch of the Ryzen 5000 for desktop in the fall of 2020 gave AMD a real claim to a faster CPU, including games. Although Rocket Lake can change this calculation in about eight weeks, AMD currently holds a leadership position in desktops.
The cell phone is not that simple. Ryzen Mobile was not released until almost a year after Ryzen Desktop. The first Ryzen desktop chips featured up to 2x the core count of a high-end Kaby Lake CPU. On mobile devices, the Ryzen 2000 family reached its maximum with four cores, while Intel increased to six-core mobile chips. Ryzen Mobile 2000 was a breath of fresh air, but it wasn’t a Coffee Lake killer.
In 2019, AMD launched 7nm desktop CPUs, but kept mobile chips with updated 12nm silicon. The Ryzen 3000 version of the Surface Laptop was highly rated, but a face-to-face comparison with Intel’s Ice Lake showed that Intel maintained an advantage in CPU performance and battery life. It was only in 2020 that the 7nm Ryzen 4000 series overtook Ice Lake. Even with this victory, Intel took the crown of CPU and GPU performance back with Tiger Lake in the same year.
One of the advantages of the partnership with Microsoft on Surface Laptop 3 was the degree of optimization that Microsoft has made for the platform. AMD told the press that part of that work would help other OEMs improve their AMD offerings.
Part of the reason why AMD faces a more competitive mobile environment comes down to time. Since 2017, AMD has launched new microarchitectures first for desktop and then for mobile. Intel, by contrast, led with the furniture. The Ryzen 7 1800X debuted against 7th generation Intel processors. Ryzen mobile chips, which were launched almost a year later, faced 8th generation mobile CPUs with higher core counts than their 7th generation equivalents.
If AMD had led with 7nm mobile chips in July 2019, it would have launched against Coffee Lake, not Ice Lake. Ice Lake may have debuted as the new mobile architecture from Intel that failed to catch AMD’s 7 nm CPUs already on the market. Instead, Ice Lake was praised for demonstrating better energy efficiency and markedly superior graphics performance.
This time compensation has consequences for how well AMD compares with Intel at any given time. When AMD’s Frank Azor appeared on The Full Nerd in May 2020, he specifically noted that OEMs were not confident that the Ryzen 4000 would be a real challenge for Ice Lake and were cautious about adapting the design.
“I think Ryzen 4000 exceeded everyone’s expectations, but most of the time, everyone tiptoed with us. So it was difficult to imagine a world where we were the fastest mobile processor, ”said Azor.
OEMs plan their upgrade cycles well in advance, and while Ryzen Mobile 2000 and 3000 are good mobile CPUs, they were clearly not better than what Intel was rolling out at the time. Ryzen 4000 was AMD’s first mobile CPU to challenge Intel in gaming, and OEMs don’t commit to submitting new system designs if they think all they will get is a single viable product generation. There are also some platform-level reasons why OEMs may prefer Intel, such as Intel’s support for PCIe x16 connections in notebooks, but this is secondary to the issue of absolute performance.
Another reason to doubt this theory is that we are already seeing evidence of more Ryzen 5000 laptops with next-generation GPUs this year. Consistent execution of AMD’s roadmap and its demonstrated ability to navigate through multiple microarchitecture changes and a complete node transition have built faith with OEMs and customers. If you look at AMD’s claims against Intel in 2005, one of the arguments put forward by AMD was its suspected inability to claim more than 15-20 percent of the global CPU market.
From the 2005 AMD lawsuit against Intel.
There is no equivalent glass ceiling visible in today’s data. AMD’s market share in mobile devices, desktops and servers has grown since Ryzen was introduced in each product family. Last summer, AMD achieved the largest market share it has held since 2012. At no time did the company indicate to ExtremeTech that it believed that the same antics could be at play today.
From an OEM’s point of view, Ryzen 4000 proved that Ryzen Mobile had the qualities to compete in gaming notebooks. Now that Ryzen 4000 and (presumably) 5000 are offering much better competition against Intel, we can expect an increase in the number of high-end gaming systems with an AMD CPU. The delays we’ve seen so far make sense, considering how AMD recently started competing in high-end mobile games.
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