Intel's Gregory Bryant says only the paranoid survive, welcomes competition from AMD, Apple, and others

In a talk with UBS and Yahoo! Finance last week, Intel EVP and GM of the Client Computing Group, Gregory Bryant, said that competition paranoia is well alive within Intel. He said,

We’ve always said, only the paranoid survive. I think that’s alive and well inside of this company. And I take all competition, whether that’s from Apple or the other ARM guys, Qualcomm, MediaTek or AMD—I take that all very seriously. Anytime you’re a growth business and a healthy business, there’s going to be competition. We absolutely intend to compete and to grow. And we feel good about our performance and our roadmap."

To Bryant's credit, Intel does have a pretty interesting roadmap for next year. The 10 nm Tiger Lake-H SKUs for high performance gaming and content creator laptops are expected to be available in H1 2021 while Rocket Lake-S (14 nm) targeted at mainstream desktops is set to launch in Q1 2021. Both Tiger Lake-H and Rocket Lake-S are expected to top-out at eight cores and 16 threads. 

Later in the year, we expect to see Intel's next-gen hybrid architecture with Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-S launch sporting a combination of low-power Gracemont and high-power Golden Cove cores. 

Intel has been seeing tough days particularly in the mainstream desktop space owing to the onslaught from AMD's Zen 3. Tiger Lake has somewhat improved the situation in mobile, but it will have an uphill task going against AMD Cezanne parts next year.

Amidst all this, Apple launched the M1 SoC-based Macs and stole the thunder from both x86 giants with a rumored M1X purported to be even more powerful.

Bryant felt that the PC is now having a new lease of life due to the pandemic necessitating remote work more than ever before. He also said Intel saw growth in the desktop space during Q2 and Q3 2020 and expects the trend to continue.