Winner: Intel
Few companies have dominated their industry over the last decade like Intel has. The world's largest chip maker once again topped the Processors category in the 2012 Annual Report Card, and it's easy to see why.
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| 2012 Annual Report Card Home Page |
After riding a wave of success last year with the launch of its Sandy Bridge architecture, Intel upped the ante this year with the introduction of its 22-nm Ivy Bridge chips. The result? Intel crushed the competition, namely AMD, in this year's Annual Report Card, winning all three subcategories of product innovation, support and partnership, and swept all the criteria by wide margins. As in past years, Intel dominates the PC and server processor markets.
While Intel last year went head-to-head against Nvidia, a newcomer to the processor category, the chip maker posted nearly identical scores this year against longtime foe AMD. And it's hardly a surprise--while AMD has struggled to gain traction in the PC and server markets with its new Fusion integrated chips, Intel's latest generation of core processors has been well-received, thanks to significant speed increases for both the CPU and GPU capabilities.
So what's next for Intel? For the short term, the company is continuing to push beyond desktops and data centers and into mobile devices; Intel recently revealed new Atom processors, code-named "Clover Trail," for tablets.
The mobile device market represents an uphill battle for Intel, since rival ARM Holdings has a sizeable lead, but the company says it is committing to building a presence in the high-growth market.
For the long term, Intel says it is already prepping the next generation of processors, including 14-nm chips, code-named Skylake, for 2013, and 10-nm processors by 2015.
"The 14-nm technology is in full development mode now and on track for full production readiness at the end of next year," said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow and director of the chip maker's Process Architecture and Integration group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last month.
