Year in Review: 2023 Brings New PC, Server Players

The sometimes-staid world of processors for PCs and servers heated up in 2023 as Intel pushed hard to make up for past challenges, AMD kept the competition hot (or cool), and new players brought Arm technology to challenge these x86 strongholds.

Intel launched its 4 nm process, and AMD drove up the core count even while giving data centers an opportunity to do more with lower-power cores. Apple introduced a couple of new PC-processor versions, and the embedded world got more AMD love. And Ampere, Nvidia, and Qualcomm also made a push to bring Arm’s instruction-set architecture (ISA)ISA into the PC and server realm.

This comes during a time when the market is poised to recover from the post-pandemic downturn, when demand for laptops dropped dramatically. TechInsights forecasts sales of microprocessors to recover beyond peak pandemic levels by 2026. The presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in PCs should spur interest in new models if the AI performs functions that customers find useful.