Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ". They just say they want fast / modern / able to do X task and 99% of people have no idea what a CPU even is.
> Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ".
I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."
Same people who buy the newest Samsung Galaxy every year.
My dad went to Best Buy to replace his 10+ year old laptop last year. He actually said he wanted Intel instead of AMD because he heard AMD processors were very slow. I had to tell him the Intel N-whatever and Celerons were also very slow so that he'd stick with one of the i-whatevers.
Basically anything they sell him will be faster than his current laptop. Many of the low power i series aren't actually much better than a celeron, but they're very common in new laptops.
CPUs aren't the bottleneck though, disk I/O and I/O in general are where most "slowness" issues are promulgated from.
You might have a good point for the home market - I couldn't say either way. I do know for the corporate market, businesses want as low a number of SKUs to support as possible, and so they will often only buy Intel (and only specific CPU models at that). This is particularly true in the datacenter / cloud world.
I work in heavily optimized compute, and it does matter there. We write assembly that is supported by one architecture only (for now), and frontier Intel chips are easier to come by. So our code runs on Intel’s processor extensions a generation or two before AMD, and that represents a high switching cost.
But this is server compute stuff which this news doesn’t seem to be about.
