There are rumors that Intel and Nvidia have conspired to block AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 series of luxury laptops. This information is presumably provided by an anonymous OEM, claiming that a secret agreement between Intel and Nvidia stipulates that top-end RTX GPUs can only be connected to Intel’s tenth generation CPUs. Intel and Nvidia both denied the allegations.
The conspiracy theory claims that Intel and Nvidia formed an alliance to keep AMD out of the mobile games market by denying access to top GPUs. This in turn will keep AMD out of the most expensive and lucrative mobile market.
There are specific reasons to think this is not happening, but let’s address the elephant in the room before we investigate. The reason conspiracy theories about blocking AMD market access find a home is that there has been a lot of bad blood between the two companies over the decades. Intel has gone as far as the Supreme Court in an attempt to revoke AMD’s right to manufacture x86 CPUs. More than a decade later, AMD has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, claiming that the company abused its monopoly in the x86 market by creating a rebate system that effectively excludes AMD outside certain market segments. Although these claims were never adjudicated in a court of law, the public opinion court had much to say about Intel’s behavior, and not much of it was good. Intel paid $ 1.25 billion to AMD and renegotiated its x86 license to settle the case, paying a $ 1.45 billion fine to the EU.
I covered the antitrust lawsuit when it happened, and I did my own research into the related compositional optimization differences that were also part of the lawsuit. While ET obviously cannot comprehensively state that no Intel-Nvidia agreement exists, there are some objective reasons to think that it does not.
Why AMD is still boosting mobile phones
To date, AMD has not placed the same emphasis on mobile devices as on computers. We’ve talking about Ryzen and mobile Ryzen as two halves of the same product, but the two had very different competitive environments.
On the desk, Ryzen’s story is simple: Ryzen punched Kaby Lake in the throat. Intel’s Core i7-8700K got its own headshot later in 2017, but from 2018-2020, Intel’s position on the desktop gradually weakened. The Ryzen 5000 computer launch in the fall of 2020 made AMD a real claim to the fastest CPU, including games. While Rocket Lake may change this calculation within about eight weeks, AMD currently holds a leadership position on the desktop.
Mobile is not that simple. Ryzen Mobile only started almost a full year after the Ryzen desktop. The first Ryzen desktop chips contained up to 2x the core count of a top-end Kaby Lake processor. On mobile devices, the Ryzen 2000 family had four core locations, while Intel pushed up to six-core mobile chips. The Ryzen Mobile 2000 was fresh air, but it was not a Coffee Lake killer.
In 2019, AMD launched 7 nm computer processors but kept mobile chips on refreshing 12 nm silicone. The Ryzen 3000 version of the Surface Laptop was rated very well, but a head-to-head comparison with Intel’s Ice Lake showed that Intel retained an advantage in the performance of the CPU and battery life. It was only in 2020 that the 7nm Ryzen 4000 series pulled ahead of Ice Lake. Even with this victory, Intel regained the CPU and GPU performance crown with Tiger Lake later that year.
One of the benefits of partnering with Microsoft on the Surface Laptop 3 was the degree of optimization Microsoft did for the platform. AMD told the press some of this work will help other OEMs improve their AMD offering.
Part of the reason AMD faces a more competitive mobile environment comes down to timing. Since 2017, AMD has introduced new micro-architectures, first for the desktop and then for the mobile phone. Intel, on the other hand, led with mobile. The Ryzen 7 1800X debuts against Intel’s 7th generation processors. The mobile Ryzen chips, launched almost a full year later, faced 8th generation mobile processors with higher core scores than their 7th generation counterparts.
If AMD had led with 7nm mobile chips in July 2019, it would have launched against Coffee Lake, not Ice Lake. Ice Lake would possibly be the new Intel mobile architecture that AMD’s already 7nm CPUs could not capture. Instead, Ice Lake was praised for demonstrating better power efficiency and significantly higher graphics performance.
This timing consideration has implications for how well AMD compared to Intel at any given time. When Frank Azor of AMD appeared on The Full Nerd in May 2020, he specifically noted that OEMs did not trust that Ryzen 4000 would present a real challenge to Ice Lake, and were careful to adapt the design.
‘I think Ryzen 4000 exceeded everyone’s expectations, but mostly everyone gives us a tip. As a result, it was difficult to imagine a world where we were the fastest mobile processor, ‘Azor said.
OEMs plan their update cycles well in advance, and although the Ryzen Mobile 2000 and 3000 were good mobile CPUs, they were not exactly better than what Intel shipped at the time. Ryzen 4000 was the first AMD mobile processor to challenge Intel in the game, and OEMs do not commit to shipping new system designs if they think they will only get one viable product generation. There are also some platform-level reasons why OEMs prefer Intel, such as supporting x16 PCIe connections on mobile devices, but this is subordinate to the issue of absolute performance.
Another reason to doubt this theory is that we are already seeing evidence of more Ryzen 5000-powered laptops with high-end GPUs than last year. AMD’s consistent implementation of the roadmap and its demonstrated ability to navigate through multiple micro-architectural shifts and a complete node transition have built trust with both OEMs and customers. Looking back at AMD’s claims against Intel in 2005, one of the arguments put forward by AMD was the presumption of claiming more than 15-20 percent of the global CPU market.
From AMD’s 2005 case against Intel.
There is no equivalent glass ceiling visible in the data today. AMD’s market share in mobile, desktop and servers has all grown since Ryzen was introduced in each product family. Last summer, AMD achieved the highest market share it has had since 2012. The company has at no point indicated to ExtremeTech that it believes the same screens can play today.
From an OEM perspective, Ryzen 4000 proved that Ryzen Mobile had the chops to compete in game notebooks. Now that Ryzen 4000 and (presumably) 5000 offer much better competition against Intel, we can expect the number of top gaming systems with an AMD CPU to increase. The delays we’ve seen so far make sense, given how recently AMD has started competing in high-end mobile games.
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