AMD has gone and done it. After years of lagging behind Intel, the company managed to take advantage of its competitor's coasting to develop and launch the new family of Ryzen processors in 2017. That's when everything changed for the better. Fast forward not even a decade and you'll find AMD topping the charts across the board, from consoles to consumer chips and enthusiasts to servers. AMD is everywhere and Intel continues to struggle.

If you're a gamer, Ryzen X3D is the way to go. Looking for something a little more potent for content creation? There's always Threadripper. And finally, EPYC is unmatched ion the data center. Intel previously dominated the market, but the company lost its way over the years, allowing AMD To take the baton and it's not even close. So, how did AMD do it? Innovation, aggressive pricing, and solid partnerships allowed AMD to go from zero to hero seemingly overnight.

Intel was king ... for a while

A full decade at the top of everything

Rewind to the first decade or so of the 21st century and it was clear to see AMD was in a spot of trouble. AMD attempted to recover from Avalon with the launch of the dreaded FX series in 2011. Things didn't go too well with Bulldozer underperforming, being incredibly inefficient, and not offering much more than its predecessor. I recall using the FX 4100, a sluggish dual-core chip with four threads.

This chip ran at around 3.7 GHz under full load, though I managed to push it up to 4.2 GHz with a custom open-loop water cooling solution. It was awful, but absolutely brilliant to work with, and managed to offer reliable computing power when tweaked. Piledriver followed in 2012 and didn't improve things as AMD hoped. It wasn't particularly great for consumer-grade applications, but did do well in the server space.

This kept AMD on the back foot against Intel, allowing its direct competitor to enjoy the fruits of labor with the Intel Core series, particularly Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Amazingly, the FX-8350 was the flagship chip launching in 2012 with four cores and a price tag of just $195. This CPU remained the best-overclocking processor ever made until the Intel 13th Gen series launched in 2022. As of writing, the Intel Core i9-14900KF holds spot #1.

Intel was king of every segment and utterly decimated AMD with gamers and general consumers. Market share was firmly in Intel's favor, offering better value, performance, efficiency, and reliability. Then came 2016 and AMD was hard at work on the next generation of processor, a complete drawing board rewrite.

The Zen era

Ryzen from the ashes

2017 was a turning point for AMD. Aptly named Ryzen, this new family of processors with an all-new Zen architecture revitalized the company's CPU efforts. Instead of chasing the wrong goals, AMD returned to basics, focusing on high core counts, improved efficiency, and competitive pricing. Intel enjoyed a solid decade of no competition from team red, allowing AMD To effectively undercut Intel on all fronts.

Technologies like Infinity Fabric, Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), and a smaller manufacturing process allowed AMD to create some exceptional processors. The only drawback with this new Zen architecture was the all-new AM4 socket and platform. Everything was brand new, which resulted in a plethora of issues for early adopters. AMD had the technology, but the software needed much refinement.

AMD came out swinging too with a processor for all parts of the consumer segment. The AMD Ryzen 5 series offered affordable options for prebuilt systems and those who didn't require the fastest multi-core performance. Ryzen 7 was the sweet spot for gamers, and Ryzen 9 was designed for content creators. Threadripper also launched for those requiring considerably higher compute performance.

Finally, we've got EPYC for the data center. These monstrous processors offered up to 128 cores with an impressive number of PCIe lanes and memory bandwidth. AMD had the foundations to take on Intel at every level and while it would take a while for the company to refine its architecture, AMD was off to a blazing start. It wasn't until 2022 until we would see the very first gamer-centric CPU from AMD, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with stacked cache.

How AMD managed to beat Intel

Taking control of the market

With the recent launch of Threadripper 9000, AMD has fully cemented itself as a global leader in the CPU space across all segments. The slide above clearly illustrates just how far the company has come, as well as how shockingly terribly Intel has performed in recent years. You'll now see an AMD-branded CPU at the top of every recommendation list across the entire CPU market, be it enterprise or constrained consumer budgets.

How AMD was able to achieve this was a combination of factors. Its partnership with TSMC for manufacturing played a major role, unlocking access to 7nm and eventually 5nm nodes. Intel was stuck on 10nm and 7nm which played in AMD's favor. How AMD put together its processors allowed for more cores to be included on the package, offering better multithreading results, and improved instructions per clock (IPC) through architectural improvements.

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D is an absolute beast in modern games, while the AMD Threadripper 9000 series will make quick work of even the most demanding creator workloads. You'll even find AMD chips inside the world's fastest supercomputer alongside Instinct's M300A GPUs. This is all great news for AMD and shows just how well a successful platform and development plan can quickly turn things around, but weaker competition is not good in the long run.

A primary reason why AMD was able to capitalize on Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC, was simply because Intel was unable to keep up. The company kept floundering around like Magikarp attempting tom use Splash until running out of PP. Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Meteor Lake just didn't take off like Intel needed. Then there was AMD going all-in on DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 while Intel was slightly slower to full adopt the new technologies.

The future could be bright

We need healthy competition

If Intel cannot get itself together to bring the fight back to AMD soon, we could see a repeat of what happened to the CPU market in the early part of the 21st century. AMD is now in Intel's seat, so it'll remain to be seen what the company plans to do with its lead. For consumers, it's great to see AMD at the top of its game, but we need Intel to be right up there too if we're to maintain healthy levels of innovation.

AMD most certainly has some road bumps ahead. TSMC is relied upon for future nodes and we've already seen diminishing returns with newer processes. Intel continues to struggle with 18A and even resorted to partnering up with fab competitor TSMC to produce its processors. Apple is storming ahead with its Arm-based processors, and the x86 pair may have to look within to steer through future storms.

2025 and 2026 will be interesting for CPU developments. Watch this space.