Intel, end of an era: Amd, Nvidia and Qualcomm on the final assault on PCs with artificial intelligence
From Computex in Taiwan, the Santa Clara-based company's competitors, with the support of Microsoft, unveil their new Copilot+ personal computer architectures, and it's a sea change the likes of which have not been seen in years
3' min read
3' min read
The world of personal computing has accustomed us for years - indeed for decades - to a great deal of static. Not so much in terms of increased performance: it has to be said that for the past 7 or 8 years we have not seen any epoch-making revolutions. After all, one can use even dated PCs without problems, something that was once not possible: a 2 or 3 year old notebook was obsolete without appeal.
Instead, right now, something new is happening, something never seen before, especially in the eyes of those who have been accustomed to the Wintel concept, the historical binomial 'Windows plus Intel'. Behold, today, in the announcements we are seeing at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, the spark has been lit that will change the balance in the world of personal computing, empowered by artificial intelligence.
It is the end of an empire. Intel's dominance in microprocessors for PCs, undermined only by Amd in various sorties that sought to make inroads into the Santa Clara giant's competitive abuses, reinforced in recent years by a solid strategy from a technological point of view, has come to an end.
True, Intel has long since ceased to be the queen of chips: at the top of the semiconductor industry (especially in terms of capitalisation), thanks to the mobile revolution, the connected self-driving car, and IoT digital devices, is Nvidia, followed by players such as Qualcomm and Amd.
The reasons for a descent
.Intel is going downhill for a number of reasons: the historic mistake of not having pushed on the smartphone front and, therefore, on ARM architectures (now a winner), the inability to understand that there was a thriving digital life beyond the dear old PC, the end of the relationship with Apple, which by making its own processors (we are now at the M3 generation) has dictated a new performance benchmark. And the crisis of the historical relationship with Microsoft, which decided to push its Windows and its world towards processing architectures other than the historical X86, and also to focus on ARM and on Npu (Neural Processing Units), i.e. accelerators for artificial intelligence.
