AMD shares soar on the back of Intel’s 7nm woes: 16 percent gains as Ryzen 3000 remains a 7nm leader

Earlier, we’d reported about Intel’s decision to delay its 7nm products by another year due to unresolved issues with its fabrication process. This was undeniably positive news for AMD, giving the company another year of exclusivity as the only CPU maker delivering 7nm x86 chips for desktop and mobility. 

Shortly after the Intel announcement, AMD’s shares soared, with the company gaining sixteen percent on NASDAQ at closing time. While AMD is only a fraction of Intel’s size in terms of overall market capitalisation, Intel’s delay offers AMD a window of opportunity to further cement its process leadership. 

AMD’s CPU lineup has been based on 7nm lithography ever since the arrival of the Ryzen 3000 series last year. A combination of efficiency gains, higher clocks, IPC improvements, and a chiplet-based architecture meant that Ryzen 3000 parts like the Ryzen 5 3600 were able to deliver equivalent single-threaded performance to their Coffee Lake counterparts while handily beating them in multi-core workloads. 

AMD’s Ryzen 4000 desktop series, built on an enhanced 7nm process is expected to arrive soon and promises further gains in terms of IPC and clockspeeds. With Intel’s Rocket Lake S chips still built on the 14nm process, Intel’s really stretching of what’s physically possible on the 14nm node - even if Rocket Lake S parts outperform Ryzen 4000, they will likely do so at significantly higher power draw.