SOLVED: 5 Reasons Companies Still Prefer Intel CPU’s

It’s not news to anyone who follows the industry that Intel has fallen behind in the performance race. Chip companies like AMD, NVIDIA, ARM, and Qualcomm, all have superior performance in some category. If that’s true, why are Intel CPU’s in more new corporate computers than all of the others combined?

This is because there is more to purchasing a computer than just the raw performance numbers of the CPU:

1. PRICE:
   • Intel hasn’t raised its price on mainstream processors in years and with inflation that means the real price has dropped. As new Intel CPU’s are released, they are usually priced at the previous products current ask.
   • Beyond that, Intel is actually dropped the price of a number of their popular CPU’s to remain competitive on a performance / price ratio basis
   • Typically the cost of the CPU is about 25% of the entire computers cost to manufacture, assemble and ship, so it is very difficult for corporate buyers to get an accurate feel for the cost of just the CPU they are buying
2. MANUFACTURER CHOICE:
   • Governments and companies do not build their own computers anymore . They buy virtually all of them from Dell (27%), HP (26%), Lenovo (17%) or Microsoft (think Surfacebooks – 4%) and those four have nearly all of their corporate targetted computers using Intel CPU’s
3. TRUST:
   • No one will be fired for buying an Intel based desktop or laptop, but if they source an AMD Ryzen or Qualcomm Snapdragon based computer and one of the companies applications doesn’t work properly with it they could lose their job.
   • Intel claims to be the most trusted brand on the planet and while we’re not sure that that is accurate we are sure that they are more trusted than any one else in the computer CPU business.
4. CONSISTANCY:
   • Companies buy today mostly what they bought yesterday, just out of habit.
5. ADDITIONAL FEATURES:
   • As you can see in the two graphics below, Intel offers hardware level features beyond just compute capacity, that companies value even if consumers don’t.
   • You can see that Intel has deep partnerships with many high profile corporate IT security companies like Crowdstrike, Trend and Microsoft, that use exclusive Intel CPU hardware features to check processes that are running in memory and before the operating system even loads on startup.
     • Detection Exploit Enhanced Hardware (HEED) and Accelerated Scanning Memory (AMS) can worth with enterprise EDR software, or without.
     • For example, Intel CPU’s can use their Machine Learning AI capabilities and to detect patterns in the requests they processing and quickly determine they are being used to encrypt a hard drive. They can do this without any software or operating system “agents” at all, and so Intel CPU monitoring can be the most efficient way to block ransomware
   • There are also some very useful features in the Intel vPro stack that are used by enterprise software and corporate IT administrators
     • Intel vPro provides advanced BIOS-level remote management capabilities. This includes Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), which allows for “out-of-band” management, meaning remote management regardless of power state or whether an operating system (OS) is functioning.
     • Intel AMT is the only solution with remote remediation to return PCs to a known good state, even when the OS is down.

In case you’re thinking we might just be Intel fanboys, blind to the reality of the market, in addition to being authorized Intel resellers, we also proudly sell AMD product and Microsoft surface books running Qualcomm CPU’s.

The point of this article is not to promote Intel and their amazing new Core Ultra CPU‘s, it’s to explain to some of our customers why they might want to stay with Intel. We are happy to support them using any platform.