CES PC Segment Highlights: AMD About To Inflict Considerable Pain On Intel

Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) shared their respective PC CPU offering for 2025 at the CES event on Monday. In addition to a super strong lineup, AMD also delivered a major and long-sought commercial PC design win in from Dell (DELL). The stock reaction suggests that the market neither understands the significance of the product line nor the Dell commercial design win. This article discusses the significance of the product line and the Dell design win and the impact on various players.

Let us first look at the killer part of the AMD product line.

The first thing to note in the above table is the number of graphics cores in each offering. These products are based on the long rumored “Strix Halo” product line which is a graphics beast offering 16 to 40 graphics cores compared to the traditional APUs which have 2 to 10 graphics cores. AMD had the technology to do this class of product since 2020 when AMD released Sony (SNE) PS5 and Microsoft (MSFT) X Box Series X.

Beyond The Hype has been waiting for AMD to deliver this class of product to the PC market ever since PlayStation5, and that has finally materialized. While third party benchmarks will take time to arrive, the gaming capability of this product line is likely to be better than anything in the market except for the top few high-end Nvidia (NVDA) graphics solutions. In other words, the integrated GPU in AMD Ryzen AI Max product line has the capability to compete with all but the top few of Nvidia’s discrete gaming GPU products.

The only way for OEMs to reproduce this level of performance will be to bundle high priced Intel CPUs and high priced Nvidia GPUs. Even at a cost disadvantage, the combined Intel/Nvidia solutions are likely to suffer from performance disadvantage due to thermal constraints (alternately, the solutions which use Intel/Nvidia solution will be boxier and heavier).

OEMs adopting Strix Halo based products can offer low-end to mid-range to even high-end gaming laptops and workstations at a substantially lower cost and with a superior performance per watt compared to Intel and Nvidia alternatives. With Strix Halo, AMD is now officially going after 20% of the PC segment that uses GPUs for gaming or AI development or other GPU intensive workloads. With cost and performance advantage, AMD now has the potential to eat into Nvidia’s PC GPU market share as well as Intel PC CPU market share. Actual market share gains would depend on what percentage of the market goes for value as opposed to demanding Nvidia GPU brand.