Will Intel ever be back in the workstation market?

Certainly not this year. But there are promising signs for next year, if Intel hits all its claims - and assuming AMD doesn't jump ahead once more

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Only one of the systems on test this month ships with an Intel processor

It feels like a broken record to be discussing how far ahead AMD is with workstation CPUs. We've been riffing around this topic since the AMD Ryzen Threadripper appeared in 2018. By 2019 AMD CPUs were already dominating the higher-end price point, and this hasn't changed since. With just one uncompetitive Intel Xeon on display this month, we need to ask what it will take to return Intel to its dominant ways of the past.

The controversy surrounding 13th and 14th gen Intel Core CPUs hasn't helped Intel's progress. These CPUs experienced elevated operating voltages and thermal management challenges, which could lead to degradation and eventual failure. Intel did fix this with microcode updates, but not without an impact on performance.

The 15th gen Intel Core arrived in mobile form in 2023, and with it a brand change to Core Ultra. It was the first mainstream Intel microarchitecture chip to use a disaggregated multi-chip module (MCM) design, which AMD has been using for its Zen architecture since 2017. This allows different functions of the processor package to be separated into different "tiles" (or "chiplets" in AMD language), such as the memory controller, I/O and integrated graphics.