by How did Intel fare in 2022? In many ways, it’s been a rollercoaster year for Team Blue, with some marked ups and downs. Let’s dive right in and take a close look at where Intel has done well this year, and where things have gone off the rails to a lesser – or more – extent.
Raptors in the wild
In early 2022, Intel made progress in reclaiming desktop market share from AMD with strong Alder Lake processor sales, and followed strongly later in the year with the launch of new processors from 13th generation.
Intel launched its Raptor Lake processors in October 2022, or at least the first group of desktop processors led by the flagship Core i9-13900K. And while it’s “just” an Alder Lake refresh on paper, the 13th-gen newcomers have added plenty of pep to the mix beyond Intel’s 12th-gen. Raptor Lake bristled with much more efficient cores, it had increased cache, and performance was much improved over Alder Lake overall.
The flagship 13900K blew us away in terms of multi-core performance in particular, and is a very good heavy chip, although it’s power-hungry and obviously not cheap. Further down the Raptor Lake line there were processors that also shone, and the Core i5-13600K proved to be a more affordable option that offered great gaming performance at a great value proposition.
There’s no doubt that Intel won the mid-range chip battle here against AMD’s Ryzen 7600X, which hit the shelves just before the 13600K, and while those CPUs are actually well matched in terms of performance, Team Red lost out due to the upgrade costs of moving to the new Zen 4 platform. plus DDR5 RAM is mandatory, while cheaper DDR4 memory can still be used with Raptor Lake).
In short, Raptor Lake was a big victory for Intel in 2022, to the point that AMD slashed the prices of its (still very recent) Zen 4 processors (for Black Friday in particular, but also after too). In short, the Core i9-13900K also stole the crown for the fastest overclock ever for a desktop processor – an astonishing 8.8 GHz. This underlined the potential of this silicon for avid overclockers.
Intel’s Alchemist GPU launch isn’t so magical
In 2022, Intel finally released its Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards to take on AMD and Nvidia. It was Intel’s big time to start establishing itself as a third player in the graphics card market and inject some much needed competitiveness, although unfortunately the debut of Arc GPUs (for laptops and desktops) could be described in two words: fragile and wonky. Those two words mean the same thing, of course, but the early days of Arc were so ubiquitous that you have to double down on the hesitant nature of the launch.
We saw delays, GPUs that only launched in Asia, promises from Intel that it wasn’t going that far, and then more delays…you get the idea. In short, disappointment reigned on many fronts, from delayed launch dates – or even lack thereof – to the performance of the Arc graphics cards that emerged as 2022 wore on (the budget A3 series and A7 top of the line ). Wonky drivers and performance issues have proven to be thorny issues for many games.
At one point, there were even rumors that Intel was in such bad shape with its Arc GPUs that the company was considering scrapping the entire project, which Team Blue has vehemently denied, and has since proven. his seriousness to continue with Arc.
In fact, at the end of the year, Intel made some serious progress with Arc GPU drivers, ushering in big performance improvements for some games. That’s an optimistic note to end with at least 2022, and if Intel can continue to smooth out drivers and offer competitive pricing, the Arc story of its new GPUs might have a happy ending after all. Which is definitely not what we expected mid-year, that’s for sure.
It’s clear that Nvidia is still open to attacks from the budget side of the market, which seems to remain a much lower priority for Team Green, and a definite space where Intel could capitalize against the dominant GPU power as a result.
XeSS Achievements
XeSS – which is Intel’s equivalent of Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR – has also quietly established itself as a force in the world of increased frame rates, with an impressive first impression in its early days.
The takeaway here is that in their early incarnations, DLSS and FSR had their fair share of stumbling blocks, and Intel’s opening salvo with XeSS is relatively impressive in this initial implementation. This bodes well for the future, alongside the progress made with the Arc graphics driver we just discussed.
Process accelerator floor
Intel closed 2022 with big talk about how it is accelerating chip development and production, including manufacturing chips for third parties, like MediaTek, and moving to more advanced processes — that is. say faster and more efficient chips – without any lag. And delays on that front are something Intel has suffered a lot from in the past, as you may recall (hanging on 14nm refreshes of its processors for what felt like forever).
That’s all in the past, however, according to Ann Kelleher, vice president and general manager of technology development at Intel, who said in December that Intel was not only on the right track, but actively ahead of the game in some areas. Team Blue is already mass-producing 7nm chips — that’s the next step from the current 10nm silicon — and the company is ready to start with 4nm, the next step.
This is code for “beware AMD – we’ve come to steal more ground from Ryzen processors”.
Declining profits and job cuts
While progress may be back on track in refining and introducing new processes, and plans to regain leadership in chip production are underway, it hasn’t happened without Tough decisions for Intel in 2022, as its profit levels have fallen dramatically (the great PC crisis with sales not helping Team Blue, of course).
You may remember that Intel shut down its Optane memory business in July, and then in September CEO Pat Gelsinger warned that Intel’s performance would continue to decline in the future, in vital areas such as server processors (where a decline is predicted to continue until 2025, in fact).
All of this culminated in the October announcement of cost-cutting plans involving a “significant number” of staff layoffs, with Intel looking to save some $3 billion over the next year (and far more than that on down the line, up to $10 billion in annual cost reductions by 2025).
Final Thoughts
Intel had successes in 2022, especially with consumer processors – and Raptor Lake more than cemented the progress made at the back end of Alder Lake – but that came amid challenges in the server market. , a terribly rocky and disappointing Arc GPU launch, alongside declining earnings and job cuts.
So it’s hard to call the year favorable for Intel, but the company seems to be realigning itself to be well positioned for better things to happen in the future. Certainly in terms of bolstering chip production capabilities and keeping on track to transition to new processes without delay – Meteor Lake processors remain on target for a 2023 launch.
And let’s not forget that Arc graphics cards weren’t entirely behind in 2022. It was a bad start for GPUs, let’s face it, but Intel’s drivers made good progress with gains of performance at the end of the year (and XeSS has established itself well). Indeed, Intel has gained a significant 4% discrete GPU market share by the end of the year, with the potential to gain more in the budget area in 2023.
There is a feeling that the negative aspects of the past year will become more positive, perhaps – aside from these very unfortunate job losses, of course.
