Intel reportedly considers CPU price cuts to defend market dominance

Intel is facing stiff competition within the CPU market, with AMD’s new Zen 2 architecture delivering compelling performance numbers across the desktop, enterprise and notebook markets. Intel hasn’t faced competition this intense in well over a decade, making the company’s x86 dominance far from assured moving forward. 

DigiTimes (behind paywall) has reported that Intel plans to cut the prices of its processors in the second half of 2020, citing sources within several major PC manufacturers. These price cuts could be how Intel plans to combat AMD’s next-generation Ryzen processors, as AMD is sure to release new processors this year. AMD’s Lisa Su has already stated that the company plans to talk more about its Zen 3 series processors later this year, a promise which should have Intel worried. 

Intel’s 2020 series of mainstream desktop processors are expected to be made up of Comet Lake series parts. These CPUs will contain up to 10 cores and utilise what’s fundamentally the same underlying CPU architecture as Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake, albeit with higher core counts and clock speeds. This limits the competitiveness of Intel’s 10th generation desktop products, as a lack of change on the process, which is expected to remain as 14nm, and architecture fronts will prevent Intel from making major single-threaded performance gains are significant leaps in power efficiency.     
   
As Intel enters the second half of 2020, the company may need to start offering its customers more value. If they cannot provide increased value on a technological level, with boosted CPU performance or power efficiency, the company will need to deliver it with decreased prices. This will cut into Intel’s profit margins, and may also force AMD to reconsider its own pricing.