After a roaring 2021 in which AMD and Intel saw record revenue and profits, AMD has finally pipped Intel in overall market cap, making it the more valuable company despite being dwarfed by Chipzilla’s sprawling stature. Although market caps due fluctuate based on a company’s stock price, AMD actually pulled this feat off twice in the past week, climbing to a value of $188 billion compared to Intel’s $182 billion. “AMD worth more than Intel” isn’t a headline we expected to write, even briefly, but here we are.
The news of AMD’s sudden surge in valuation comes via Yahoo Finance, which bases the company’s rise on several recent developments. Possibly the most valuable is the news that AMD finally completed its $35 billion purchase of semiconductor Xilinx, which is the largest acquisition in its history. The acquisition is expected to bolster AMD’s portfolio of cloud and data center products going forward. Of course, Intel also had an acquisition of its own recently, as it announced it was purchasing Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion in an effort to add new capacity and services to its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) division, but the merger will take some time to resolve.
AMD / Xilinx merger. Image by AMD.
Perhaps the biggest reason is just that AMD has been posting better numbers for quite some time, despite those numbers being smaller than Intel’s due to their size discrepancy. As we reported previously, AMD finished 2021 with a 68 percent increase in revenue year-over-year, while Intel only boosted revenue last year by one percent, though it did earn record revenue.
According to Yahoo, in 2022 this trend might continue as AMD has projected a 31 percent growth in revenue, while Intel is anticipating a more meager two percent increase. Intel is also busy dumping truckloads of cash into new projects around the world, such as its new $20 billion fab in Ohio, as it tries to address the surging demand for semiconductors. These expansion plans will likely cause Intel to incur a $36 billion penalty in the near term as it begins to ramp up its production capacity with the hopes of avoiding a similar crisis in the future.
Overall 2022 will be a pivotal year for both companies, as the competition between them is already red hot. Intel has already begun to reclaim the CPU performance crown from AMD with its Alder Lake desktop CPUs, and now the companies are set to do battle with their latest mobile platforms as well, which both companies are in the process of launching currently. On the desktop side of the equation, Intel is already apparently cutting into AMD’s market share according to at least one source. That source, Passmark, shows that although the company’s are comparatively even in the desktop market, it’s not even close in the laptop market as Intel holds around 77 percent of it, compared to AMD’s 23 percent. AMD’s new 6000 series mobile chips have just launched so it’s too early to tell what kind of a threat they might pose to Intel, but early reviews show AMD has prioritized power efficiency over raw horsepower.
Though AMD and Intel battling in the laptop and desktop space is nothing new, the companies will also be clashing in a big way in the server arena in 2022, as AMD preps its highly-anticipated Milan-X CPUs and upcoming Zen 4 Genoa to do battle with Intel’s upcoming Sapphire Rapids chips. This market is critical to both companies for many reasons, and Intel is hoping its next-generation CPUs will be able to allow it to take back the server CPU performance crown from AMD in the same way it has on the desktop with Alder Lake. According to recently leaked benchmarks comparing Milan-X to Sapphire Rapids, it looks like AMD is going to have its hands full in 2022 despite its rosy financial outlook.
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