Intel is finally having its Ryzen moment—and it couldn't have happened at a worse time

Back in the mid-2010s, Intel was the undisputed king of the consumer CPU market. It offered the best gaming and productivity CPUs, with its closest rival, AMD, struggling to deliver a competitive product ever since the debut of its infamous Bulldozer microarchitecture.

But Intel was so dominant that it started to slack off. Its mainstream CPUs were stuck on a quad-core design for years, new generations brought unexciting performance gains, and pricing was anything but competitive. Then AMD stormed the gates with its revolutionary Ryzen architecture, and less than a decade later, AMD’s consumer CPUs are almost as popular as Intel’s. A praiseworthy achievement considering Intel’s grip on the market during the 2010s was as tight as NVIDIA’s hold on today’s GPU market.

Intel had been in a lull for the better part of the last decade, trying to regain its footing with little success, but thanks to its fresh-out-of-the-oven Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs, it looks like the company has finally found a way to reinvent itself—to have its Ryzen moment.

Intel is the underdog now

Just like AMD was back in 2017

Despite holding the majority of the consumer CPU market, Intel is now the underdog. Everyone and their mother has been buying Ryzen CPUs for their gaming rigs for more than half a decade, with AMD’s EPYC CPUs also being the better option than Intel’s Xeon in the server market for years. The gaming performance advantage AMD’s X3D CPUs have over Intel CPUs cannot be understated, and AMD is also worth a healthy ~$100 billion more than Intel as of this writing.

Intel’s position isn’t nearly as precarious as AMD’s before it launched first-gen Ryzen CPUs, but things are anything but rosy for Team Blue, and haven’t been for the better part of the decade. Still, adversity is the seed of success, and after struggling with monolithic CPU designs for generations, Intel has finally mastered a forward-looking, chiplet-based design.

The company has finally honed its chiplet-based CPU design

Intel’s tile-based design is very similar to AMD’s chiplet architecture

While the first two generations of desktop Ryzen CPUs did feature a monolithic design, the real breakthrough came with the Zen 2 architecture (Ryzen 3000), which introduced a chiplet-based design. This considerably lowered manufacturing costs, improved yields and energy efficiency, and allowed AMD to further increase the core counts of its Ryzen and EPYC CPUs.

Intel did take note of what AMD had been doing, and the company began working on its own chiplet approach in the late 2010s. We got an early look at Intel’s tile concept in 2021, with the mobile-focused Meteor Lake CPU lineup becoming the first to feature a tile-based design in 2023.

The launch was a massive success, with Meteor Lake CPUs offering impressive power efficiency, tons of cores, strong single-thread performance, and excellent iGPU performance. The design was refined with Lunar Lake, which further improved the already impressive efficiency as well as both single and multithreaded performance. Combining a hybrid core (P-cores and E-cores) architecture with a chiplet design was a home run for Intel.

Intel’s first desktop foray into tile-based CPUs, Arrow Lake, wasn’t as successful as its laptop counterparts, mostly due to disappointing gaming performance compared to the company’s last-gen CPUs and the comically overpriced Core Ultra 9 285K. But Intel didn’t give up; it refined the original design and recently launched Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs, which outperform every non-X3D AMD CPU, along with Intel’s own 14th-gen chips, in gaming.

After years of work, Intel has perfected its tile-based desktop CPU design and is now taking the fight back to AMD. Sure, X3D CPUs are, and will remain, the best choice for hardcore gamers, but for everyone else, Intel is once again just as viable a choice as AMD.

Intel, not AMD, offers the best bang-for-your-buck CPU right now

The new Core Ultra 200S CPUs pack tons of value as well

One of the defining features of early Ryzen CPUs was the amount of bang you’d get for your buck. While they lagged behind Intel in gaming, the first three generations of Ryzen CPUs had a knack for productivity, along with competitive pricing. If you were a PC gamer on a budget or someone in need of lots of multithreaded performance, Ryzen was the best choice.

The “most bang for your buck” trend slowed down with Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) CPUs, but AMD still had the upper hand over Intel in the budget segment, thanks to its Ryzen 5 parts offering more gaming performance than most budget or even mid-range PC builders would ever need. CPUs such as the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X and 5700X, Ryzen 5 7600X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7500F have been massive successes, with Intel unable to respond.

But nowadays, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the last-gen Core Ultra 7 265K are arguably the two best bang-for-the-buck CPUs on the market. They offer tons of cores and hold their ground against flagship AMD CPUs in most productivity tasks, with the newer model being as fast in games as any non-X3D Ryzen CPU. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is another excellent option. While it doesn’t beat the latest Ryzen 5 CPUs on the price front—it costs $220, while you can find the Ryzen 5 9600X for under $200—it outperforms them in most other areas.

Similar to AMD in the late 2010s, Intel is turning into the value choice. This is great news for every PC gamer and enthusiast because more competition is always a good thing.

Intel's next CPU socket will likely support more than a few CPU generations

Could we see Intel's version of AM4?

Aside from competitive pricing, another factor that greatly contributed to the success of early Ryzen CPUs is that the first four generations used the same CPU socket. AM4 has gone down in history as one of the longest-supported CPU sockets. If you bought a first-gen Ryzen CPU along with a quality motherboard, you could ride that platform for a decade with a simple drop-in CPU upgrade.

AM4’s popularity remains high even today, as evidenced by the fact that AMD still makes AM4 CPUs and that they’re still selling rather well. Of the 20 best-selling CPUs on Amazon, five are AM4-based. I can attest to the longevity of the socket myself. I built my Ryzen 5 5600X-powered PC in late 2020, and after upgrading to a Ryzen 7 5700X3D a year ago, I’m pretty certain I’ll use the same platform for at least a couple more years. In other words, I’ll stick with the same platform for more or less a decade thanks to AM4.

The AM5 socket is shaping up to be as long-lived as AM4, and Intel doesn’t have an answer to that. The company’s insistence on switching to a new socket every two CPU generations hasn’t done it any favors and has made the Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs look less attractive than they are, since they arrived on a dead platform. But this could change.

Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP, recently stated that Intel’s upcoming LGA1954 socket will support more than just two CPU generations. If the rumors are true, LGA1954 should support at least four generations, starting with Nova Lake, slated for launch in late 2026. This would be a massive boon for Intel’s public image and could push many PC builders to jump ship to Intel for their next build.

Intel's new strategy is sound, but the moment couldn't be worse

Tile-based chip design, combining performance and efficiency cores to deliver superb gaming and productivity performance, greatly improved power efficiency, competitive pricing, and a commitment to a new CPU socket that will support at least four CPU generations is already paying dividends. Everyone’s praising Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is seeing solid demand, and I personally can’t wait to see what Nova Lake will bring to the table.

But the moment Intel picked to start taking the desktop CPU crown back from AMD couldn’t have been worse. Memory and storage have never been more expensive thanks to global shortages, GPUs are seeing an uptick in price as well, and now consumer CPUs are also being hit by AI data center demand. Intel has already bumped prices by around 10%, with AMD preparing to do the same.

While Arrow Lake Refresh potentially gave Intel its own Ryzen moment, the company won’t be able to capitalize on its newfound momentum for at least a couple more years. But once the RAM-pocalypse unwinds a bit, if the LGA1954 socket actually supports four CPU generations and Nova Lake proves to be a clear upgrade over Arrow Lake Refresh in both pricing and performance, AMD could be in trouble.