Intel's recently appointed CEO wasn't mincing words in a recent interview with CRN, where he claimed that Intel not only "have the best product" but also that "this period of time when people could say, "Hey, [AMD] is leading," that's over." We'd say them are fighting words, regardless of what various leaks have suggested, since Intel still has a lot to prove with its upcoming Alder Lake CPUs.

Gelsinger continues with "We have 80 percent market share. We have the best software assets that are available in the industry. We do the best job supporting our partners and our OEMs with it. We have an incredible brand that our channel partners, customers want and trust. Wow, that's a lot of assets in that. If the channel partner doesn't see value in that, I want to talk to him." It's pretty clear from this that Intel believes that they're doing a bang up job and if their customers don't see it, then they need a talking to.For those that were hoping for an engineer to be at the reins of Intel again, the interview with CRN reads like a marketing spinner is at the head of the company. "We are back with a very defined view of what it requires to be leadership in every dimension: leadership product, leadership [chip] packaging, leadership process, leadership software, unquestioned leadership on critical new workloads like AI, graphics, media, power-performance, enabling again the ecosystem. This is what we will be doing with aggressive actions and programs over the next couple of years." How Intel is planning to take the lead in the graphics market is going to be interesting to see if nothing else.

Most of the interview is about how Intel is planning on growing its channel and partner ecosystem, but the article also touches on things like Apple, although once again, Gelsinger dismisses Apple's move away from Intel hardware by saying " We ultimately see the real competition to enable the ecosystem to compete with Apple". This suggests that he doesn't seem to understand why Apple decided to make its own processors in the first place. He also doesn't seem to be a fan of what he calls "Apples closed garden" while calling Windows an "open ecosystem".

When asked how Intel is going to be able to compete with AMD and the various Arm based server parts from companies like Amazon and Ampere, he simply answers "do better products". It's hard to take that kind of an answer seriously and although Intel is hardly in a situation where they're likely to end up on the brink of ruin any time soon, the company has been losing ground in both the server, desktop and notebook markets over the past couple of years.

Gelsinger isn't expecting any further slips in terms of market share, mostly due to the fact that neither Intel or AMD can increase their production at the moment and the situation is likely the same for the Arm based server chip makers. Furthermore, he's expecting pricing to remain stable, although this seems to be referring to server parts, as consumer CPUs aren't discussed in the article. He doesn't see a thread from Arm based server CPUs either, claiming that they have a "very minimal" market share today and will continue to do so.

One interesting quote about the consumer PC side is that he believes that with Alder Lake, Intel will have the "energy efficiency leadership", something no-one else is expecting. That said, it seems like he does have some respect for AMD, saying "AMD has done a solid job over the last couple of years. We won't dismiss them of the good work that they've done". It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds over the next couple of generations of CPUs from both companies, as Intel still has a lot to prove with its new CPU designs.