The Santa Clara-headquartered companies Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices announce an advisory group to combat the growing presence of Cambridge-based Arm Holdings in the chip segment. Intel has been an industry leader in the chip segment with its X86 Architecture ruling the industry for nearly 4 decades. It has facilitated the digital infrastructure from PCs and Laptops to Data centers. At the same time, AMD licenses the same technology from Intel and makes chips, competing directly against the same. 

Purpose 

However, the rise of Arm Holdings has posed significant challenges, for both companies, in retaining their market share. Arm owns a competing architecture and supplies Apple, Qualcomm, Microsoft & Alphabet in their PCs, laptops, and data centers.  Additionally, Arm’s contracts give it an upper hand wherein it states that all Arm chips will be able to run all Arm software, regardless of the manufacturer.   

Advisory Group 

At the same time, the X86 technology offered by Intel and AMD is tweaked at times to work across.  Keeping all these challenges in mind, Intel and AMD have formed an Advisory Group with companies like Broadcom, Dell Technologies, Lenovo Group, and Oracle as its founding members. 

Scope of Work 

The group aims to boost interoperability and streamline integration, hence simplifying the process for Developers, ISVs, OS Makers and OEMs. Apart from the AI revolution, chips are indispensable for IOT devices, Smart Wearables, and Automotive subsystems. This presents a huge business scope for the Adivosry group to work upon and deliver a significant outcome to benefit not only the companies but the entire X86 ecosystem.  It will bring together hardware and software companies to incorporate the essential features into the X86 ecosystem along with making it compatible across various ranges of users. 

Let’s talk about Figures 

Intel’s Foundry business is not even in the top 10 wafer foundries while AMD Controls has around 20% of the Data Centre market, 19.3% of the Mobile Phones market, and 34% in the servers market.  This poses a big challenge for the firm as it tackles its dribbling market share in the growing use of chips in the AI and Automation business. 

Prospects 

If all goes as planned,  X86 partners and customers will participate in the architectural conversation earlier. Intel’s CEO Patrick P. Gelsinger expects X86 architecture to be a potential fulfiller for the positions that are currently held by Arm.