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There is a rumor that Intel and Nvidia have conspired to block AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 series of high-end gaming laptops. This information was reportedly provided by an anonymous OEM and claims that a secret agreement between Intel and Nvidia specifies that high-end RTX GPUs can only be paired with 10th Generation Intel processors. Intel and Nvidia have both denied the claims.
The conspiracy theory maintains 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 prevent AMD from the most expensive and lucrative mobile market.
There are specific reasons to think this isn’t happening, but before we dig into them, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The reason conspiracy theories to block AMD from entering the market find a home online is that there has been a lot of bad blood between the two companies over the decades. Intel has gone to the Supreme Court to try to revoke AMD’s right to manufacture x86 processors. Over a decade later, AMD filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, alleging that the company had abused its monopoly in the x86 market by creating a rebate system that effectively excluded AMD from certain market segments. Although these claims were never evaluated by a court, the court of public opinion had a lot to say about Intel’s behavior, and little was good. Intel paid AMD $ 1.25 billion and renegotiated its x86 license to settle the case, and fined the EU $ 1.45 billion.
I covered the antitrust lawsuit when this happened and conducted my own investigations into the associated compiler optimization differences that were also part of the lawsuit. While, of course, ET cannot exhaustively state that no Intel-Nvidia deal exists, there are objective reasons to believe that it does not.
Why AMD continues to ramp up in mobile
To date, AMD hasn’t put the same emphasis on mobile as it does on the desktop. We’re talking about desktop Ryzen and mobile Ryzen as two halves of the same product, but the two have faced very different competitive environments.
On the desktop, the Ryzen story is simple: Upon launch, Ryzen hit Kaby Lake in the throat. Intel’s Core i7-8700K landed its own headshot later in 2017, but from 2018 to 2020, Intel’s position in desktop computers steadily weakened. The launch of the Ryzen 5000 desktop in the fall of 2020 made AMD truly claim the fastest processor, including gaming. While Rocket Lake could change that calculation in about eight weeks, AMD is currently in a leadership position in the desktop world.
Mobile is not that simple. Ryzen Mobile didn’t launch until almost a year after the Ryzen desktop. Early Ryzen desktop chips had up to twice the number of cores of a high-end Kaby Lake processor. On mobile, the Ryzen 2000 family has surpassed four cores, while Intel has pushed up to six mobile chips. The Ryzen Mobile 2000 was a breath of fresh air, but it wasn’t a Coffee Lake killer.
In 2019, AMD released 7nm desktop processors, but kept the mobile chips on updated 12nm silicon. The Ryzen 3000 version of the Surface Laptop received a great review, but a head-to-head comparison with Intel’s Ice Lake showed that Intel retained an edge in CPU performance and battery life. It wasn’t until 2020 that the 7nm Ryzen 4000 series got ahead of Ice Lake. Even with this victory, Intel took back the crown of processor and GPU performance with Tiger Lake later that year.
One of the perks of partnering with Microsoft on the Surface Laptop 3 was the degree of optimization Microsoft made for the platform. AMD has told reporters that some of this work will help other OEMs improve their AMD offerings.
Part of the reasons AMD faces a more competitive mobile environment comes down to timing. Since 2017, AMD has launched new microarchitectures first for desktops and then for mobiles. Intel, on the other hand, has led with mobile. The Ryzen 7 1800X debuted against 7th generation Intel processors. Ryzen mobile chips, launched almost a year later, faced 8th generation mobile processors with higher core counts than their 7th generation counterparts.
If AMD had led with 7nm mobile chips in July 2019, it would have gone against Coffee Lake, not Ice Lake. Ice Lake may have debuted as a new Intel mobile architecture that couldn’t capture AMD’s 7nm processors already on the market. Instead, Ice Lake was praised for demonstrating better power efficiency and significantly higher graphics performance.
This timing compromise has ramifications for how AMD has compared with Intel at one point. When AMD’s Frank Azor appeared on The Full Nerd in May 2020, he specifically noted that OEMs weren’t convinced Ryzen 4000 would provide Ice Lake a real challenge, and were cautious about adapting the design. .
“I think Ryzen 4000 exceeded everyone’s expectations, but for the most part everyone told us. Because of that, it was hard to imagine a world where we were the fastest mobile processor, ”Azor said.
OEMs plan their refresh cycles well in advance, and while the Ryzen Mobile 2000 and 3000 are good mobile processors, they weren’t significantly better than what Intel was delivering back then. Ryzen 4000 was the first AMD mobile processor to challenge Intel in gaming, and OEMs aren’t committing to delivering new system designs if they think all they’ll get is a single generation of viable product. There are also platform-level reasons why OEMs might prefer Intel, such as Intel’s support for PCIe x16 connections on mobile, but that’s secondary to the absolute performance issue.
Another reason to doubt this theory is that we are already seeing evidence of more Ryzen 5000-powered laptops with high-end GPUs this year than last year. AMD’s consistent execution of the roadmap, and its demonstrated ability to navigate multiple microarchitectural changes and a full node transition, has built OEM and customer confidence. If you look at AMD’s claims against Intel in 2005, one of the arguments AMD made was its suspicious inability to claim more than 15-20% of the global processor market.
From AMD’s lawsuit against Intel in 2005.
There is no equivalent glass ceiling visible in the data today. AMD’s market share in mobiles, desktops and servers has all grown since the introduction of Ryzen in each product family. Last summer, AMD achieved the highest market share since 2012. At no point has the company indicated to ExtremeTech that it believes the same shenanigans might be at play today.
From an OEM perspective, Ryzen 4000 has proven that Ryzen Mobile has the chops to compete in gaming laptops. Now that Ryzen 4000 and (presumably) 5000 offer significantly improved competition against Intel, we can expect see the number of high-end gaming systems with AMD processors increasing. The delays we’ve seen so far make sense, given the recent date that AMD started competing in premium mobile gaming.
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