Intel is having a really rough time right now, but it’s bad news for CPUs as a whole if the company fails.
Intel can’t catch a break. The instability saga we’ve witnessed over the past few months, along with a historically disastrous earnings report for the company, has led Intel into some pretty bleak territory. The company even postponed its Innovation event this year; meanwhile, shareholders are filing a lawsuit against Team Blue. No matter how you slice it, Intel is having a bad time right now.
There’s a lot of understandable anger pointed Intel’s way right now, from game developers saying they’re going to lose money, to gamers who say they’ve been denied returns, to shareholders that claim Intel fraudulently hid how bad things were. Those are all legitimate things to be frustrated about, and I understand the satisfaction you might feel when a company gets what it deserves.
On the other hand, make no mistake — the struggles Intel is facing aren’t just bad for itself. The situation is detrimental for the PC industry as a whole, and we’re only beginning to feel the ramifications.Dynamics of a duopoly
Tech is dominated by duopolies. There’s Windows and macOS, Android and iOS, Nvidia and AMD, and of course AMD and Intel. It’s not a stretch to call these duopolies, either — literally every one of those examples is listed as an example on the Wikipedia page talking about duopolies.
Of course, there are some competitors beginning to reach into these markets, such as Qualcomm’s push into laptop PCs with the release of the Snapdragon X chip. But when it comes to socketed, desktop processors, you have no other option but AMD and Intel.
In a perfect world, this would be a Bertrand duopoly, where AMD and Intel compete with each other on pricing while offering the same level of quality. There’s a big factor at play when it comes to tech, however — brand loyalty. In a study on brand loyalty, researchers found that experience, satisfaction, and trust in a brand were the main contributing factors to brand loyalty, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you’ve been building PCs for a while, you’ve lived that. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had friends pick up an Intel CPU or an Nvidia GPU because that’s what they’ve always used.
That experience is powerful, and it leads a lot of enthusiasts to form into camps about the products they purchase. There’s the fan culture surrounding AMD and Intel, where fans will defend their company of choice or, more often than not, dogpile on the opposing company when things go wrong.
That’s what’s happening with Intel right now. Just look at this thread from the AMD subreddit where commenters are positing on the internal contracts with server providers and even the supply of AMD and Intel.
