Intel, AMD team up to confront rising challenge from Arm

The market share of both firms has been eroded by Arm [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday said they are forming a group to help make sure software works across their chips, responding to a rising challenge from Arm Holdings.

Intel invented what is known as the x86 computing architecture, a technology that for 40 years has powered the world’s laptops, PCs and data centre servers. AMD licenses the technology from Intel and also makes chips using x86, competing directly against Intel under a longstanding legal settlement.

But the market share of both firms has been eroded by Arm, which licenses a competing architecture for computing to laptop chip designers such as Apple and Qualcomm, as well as to firms like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet that use it in data centres. Part of Arm’s rise stems from rules in its contracts that all Arm chips be able to run all Arm software, regardless of who made the chip.

By contrast, Intel and AMD use the same underlying x86 technology in their chips, but software sometimes must be tweaked to work across their offerings. On Tuesday, the two companies said they were forming an “advisory group” to change that, with Broadcom, Dell Technologies, Lenovo Group and Oracle, among others, joining as founding members.

The group will bring together hardware and software companies to get their technical input for “essential functions and features” for chips from Intel and AMD to make sure they are “consistent and compatible” across a range of uses, according to the group’s announcement.

At a developer event hosted by Lenovo in Seattle, Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said x86 technology can readily be adapted for uses such as new laptops with AI features.

“Rumors of my death are severely exaggerated. We are alive and well,” Gelsinger said. “We see that the x86 architecture, this foundation of computing for decades, is about to go through a period of customization, expansion, scalability (with) the opportunities that AI will present, and our ecosystem is robust and growing.”