Is there any market segment they are currently competitive in?
I can't think of one.
Even in their darkest days, AMD was winning the "$100-300 desktop with an integrated GPU" segment by a large price-performance margin (vs Atom processors).
New intel cpu is competitive in gaming, but with the sacrifice of the power. And amd still has the counter play with 3d cache version which crushes intel on every metric. So yeah..
They win absolute performance on Desktop CPUs but lose on perf-per-watt.
An argument could be made for AMD's 5800x3d in gaming, but when paired with a 4090, the intel CPUs take the lead.
Heat distribution as far as I can tell, this video from derbauer shows that shifting the way the cooler contacts the CPU lid (aka offset mounting) can provide drastically lower temperatures which means the cpu is allowed to draw more juice. In the video [1], there's an 8% improvement which tbh is massive; though it seems that the creator missed that, so ignore the conclusion, look at the numbers. An 8% improvement would have put AMD in the lead with intel unable to compete.
Here is the catch; when Intel and AMD presented their slides, nobody could disclose information about the Lovelace performance, and therefore all comparisons were made using a 3090ti, and in that scenario, even in Intel's own graphs, the 5800x3d was actually performing very well; so much so that they were playing coy with its performance;
AMD has a huge gaping pricing hole between AM4 and anything AM5, which makes Intel 13th gen rather more attractive. And the 5800X3D is actually faster than the AM5 parts in some titles iirc
>Is there any market segment they are currently competitive in?
Intel is winning mainstream CPUs right now. Partly because AMD priced their new chips too high at launch, and partly because total system cost for AMD is higher because the motherboards were also more expensive, and you had to use more expensive DDR5.
AMD has been cutting prices, motherboards are getting cheaper, and DDR5 memory is falling. So the difference is less and less. But for the last year or so Intel was best choice for a new system, though the AMD 5800X3D was solid as a pure gaming value build. (Still is, actually.)
I am actually a little confused how Intel fabs can be considered far behind TSMC but their desktop consumer CPUs have been better or at least roughly equal to AMD in the last year. Is Intel just making lower profit margins and eating the cost to compete?
They have some very low power but decent performance cpus like the Pentium Silver N6000 series, but I don't know if they view them as good for lowend NUC like machines.
I would certainly be interested in buying some, just not in the form of the lowend laptops they are currently in.
intel is ahead on the top end of the consumer market with its latest gen of processors, in single threaded up to reasonably multithreaded. usually a single thread is pacing for games, even simulations, though it shouldn't be. it's hard to parallelize
I've seen this in action professionally and it drove me up the wall.
At a previous job I had to spec out some hardware procurement on the order of a million dollars over two years, and all of my compute was based around AMD EPYC. The amount of fighting and arguing that this resulted in was wild. These were all still supermicro boxes, still from the same trusted vendor we were using, but I had to spell out many times that we were basically getting double the compute for what we would have got otherwise.
Worst part was when the first shipment arrived and nothing booted and worked and turned it out be a bad batch of drives from micron that had bad controllers, the same ignoramus used it as a "I told you so" moment, even though the vendor confirmed it was a micron issue and immediately shipped over replacements.
I can't think of one.
Even in their darkest days, AMD was winning the "$100-300 desktop with an integrated GPU" segment by a large price-performance margin (vs Atom processors).