AMD Scared of Intel’s Reaction to Ryzen

AMD is on a high just a week prior to the release of its new Ryzen processor architecture, which it believes will help it regain a significant portion of market share against CPU rival Intel. Given that Ryzen could potentially offer greater performance than Intel’s Kaby Lake architecture for less money, AMD’s confidence appears to be well placed.

Despite the company’s belief in Ryzen, though, it seems to be bracing itself for a new offensive from Intel, which will no doubt be keen to retain its CPU market domination for as long as it can. According to AMD’s recent Form 10-K financial report – dug up by PCGamesN’s Dave James – the company is worried about its opponent’s ability to aggressively outspend it and leverage its partners – such as NVIDIA, with which AMD has separate GPU rivalry – to retain its control of the market.

“Intel’s market share, margins and significant financial resources enable it to market its products aggressively, to target our customers and our channel partners with special incentives and to influence customers who do business with us,” AMD says in the Form 10-K. “These aggressive activities have in the past resulted in lower unit sales and a lower average selling price for many of our products and adversely affected our margins and profitability.”

“Intel could also take actions that place our discrete GPUs at a competitive disadvantage,” the report adds, “including giving one or more of our competitors in the graphics market, such as Nvidia Corporation, preferential access to its proprietary graphics interface or other useful information.”

While AMD is right to be weary of Intel, all signs point to 2017 being the year of Ryzen. AMD’s new CPU architecture hits the market on 3^rd March.