A decade ago, the landscape of the x86 processor market was nowhere near as competitive as it is now. AMD really wasn't the force in the processor market it is known as today.In early 2014, with Rory Read at the helm, it had been a while since AMD had tasted glory. By Read's departure, the last time the company posed a real threat to Intel was back in the early 2000s with its Athlon 64 processors. After that point, the company slowly slid into position as the budget alternative for users who either couldn't justify or afford Intel's pricing.By 2014, AMD's primary core architecture for desktop chips was codenamed Piledriver, a Bulldozer successor, but the only thing they are really remembered for is being power hungry and underperforming on The Reg we once joked they could double up as portable space heaters. As for Intel's Sandy and Ivy Bridge chips, they were a design triumph that led to Chipzilla winning then maintaining dominance over the whole x86 market without breaking a sweat. And it wasn't seeing much pushback from AMD, whose lackluster architecture allowed Intel to dictate the direction of the desktop market.On top of this, AMD's revenues left a lot to be desired, its market share was even thinner, and it meant a long climb ahead if it wanted back in the game.No one would have known this more than MIT engineer Dr Lisa Su, who was already AMD's chief operating officer running the company's sales and marketing teams. Named an IEEE Fellow in 2009, Su had been poached by AMD from Freescale Semiconductor, where she was CTO, in 2012. Su's appointment in 2014 tasked her with transforming not only AMD's overall narrative and public perception going forward, but also with defining a roadmap that was technically up to par.AMD needed to rebuild its core architectures from the ground up to have any hope of clawing back market share. Under her leadership, AMD shifted from the "affordable" alternative to a genuine contender. Ryzen put AMD back in the desktop market, Epyc began chipping away at Intel's datacenter dominance, and RDNA gave AMD's GPUs a second life. Today, AMD is no longer just the budget pick; it's setting the pace on price and performance, forcing Intel to keep up.Setting the stage for ZenAMD spent the early 2010s struggling to stay relevant. Bulldozer, the CPU architecture it had pinned its hopes on, was supposed to keep AMD in the race with Intel. Instead, it became a case study on missed opportunities. Why? Bulldozer focused on core count at the expense of per-core performance, which backfired because most software still relied on single-threaded performance, Intel's area of strength. AMD's chips ran hot and simply couldn't compete on speed, leaving Intel to dominate the desktop CPU market on performance.Su didn't waste time when she took over as CEO in 2014. She binned the failing strategies and got AMD to work on a new roadmap that focused on solid engineering.The calm before the storm: AMD's Zen bears down on Intel CPUsREAD MOREThe result of all this was Zen, which we know today as AMD's Ryzen series. The original Zen microarchitecture launched in 2017, and it was a ground-up redesign focused on performance, efficiency, and scalability. It thrusted AMD back into the desktop game, but also became the foundation of AMD's key processors across all its primary product segments.The Zen+ microarchitecture arrived in 2018 with the Ryzen 2000 series. It used a 12nm process, and brought with it slight clock speed increases and reduced memory and cache latency. On the server side, AMD's first-gen Epyc processors, codenamed Naples, the company's first Zen-based server chip, started AMD's slow push back into the datacenter. AMD's Epyc line-up is now leading the charge in the server space, with SemiAnalysis's Sravan Kundojjala recently noting that AMD had overtaken Intel for the first time in datacenter revenue in Q3 2024. To put this into perspective, though, AMD's DC revenue scale is still small relative to, say, Nvidia, whose "networking (non compute) revenue alone" swamps that of Su's company.In 2019, AMD launched Zen 2 and delivered the subsequent Ryzen 3000 family on a newer 7nm process. This also marked the architectural change to AMD's new chiplet-based design, which enabled higher core counts and better overall performance and power efficiency.On the server side, Epyc Rome followed, scaling its chips up to 64 cores and offering better value for the enterprise markets. The first Ryzen Mobile 4000 series (Renoir) launched in 2020, bringing its Zen 2 designs to laptops. Renoir combined power-efficient cores with Vega graphics, putting AMD back in the notebook market after years of irrelevance.As Su noted in a Q4 2019 earnings call: "We ended 2019 with our highest quarterly client processor unit shipments in more than six years based on strong demand for Ryzen desktop and mobile processors."A turning pointIn 2020, Zen 3 brought the Ryzen 5000 series to market with a major IPC uplift, helping AMD finally beat Intel in single-threaded performance. This was a turning point for AMD, which not only made things more competitive, but put Intel on the back foot. Its Epyc Milan chips, based on Zen 3, launched a year later and expanded AMD's server line-up with much-improved performance per watt compared to previous generations. The Ryzen Mobile 5000 series (Cezanne) followed, blending Zen 3 cores with updated Vega integrated graphics for thin and light laptops.By 2022, Zen 4 launched on TSMC's 5nm node with Ryzen 7000, adding support for the latest DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0. On the mobile side, the Ryzen Mobile 6000 series (Rembrandt) arrived with Zen 3+ cores and RDNA 2 integrated graphics, improving overall battery life and performance. Epyc Genoa upped server core counts to 96, while Bergamo optimized for dense, cloud-native workloads with more compact cores, pushing performance, value, and power efficiency in these environments.In February 2022, AMD completed its $50 billion acquisition of Xilinx, a leading provider of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The merger pulled AMD firmly into the AI space, with its Ryzen AI engine embedded in most of its mobile products. It was a canny move as everything chipmakers do currently revolves around AI, with neural processing units (NPUs) giving chips the ability to compute AI workloads directly instead of being processed in the cloud.More recently, AMD launched its Zen 5-powered Ryzen 8000, as well as its Epyc Turin chips, which use TSMC's 4nm process. Turin added on-chip AI acceleration, while Ryzen Mobile 8000 (Strix Point) brought both full-fat Zen 5 and the more compact Zen 5c cores and RDNA 3 graphics to laptops, with better efficiency and heavy focus on AI-based features.Picture this the graphics problemPerhaps the biggest obstacle of the past ten years has been the graphics market, and despite significant improvements with both RDNA and RDNA 2, AMD still trails Nvidia in performance. In areas such as ray tracing, AI-based upscaling, and general developer support, AMD still struggles to compete. Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem has kept team green the dominant force in GPUs, especially in AI and gaming, which has kept AMD playing second fiddle despite competitive pricing and performance.In the laptop market, Ryzen Mobile has made significant strides in performance, power efficiency, and overall OEM adoption rates into its key product lines. However, AMD is still far from being able to dethrone Intel in the mobile market. The majority of OEMs have still been reluctant to adopt AMD processors in their most premium consumer and enterprise notebooks, leaving Intel to dominate at the very top end.That's a moving target, though, and we are seeing what AMD calls "Advantage Notebooks" where it uses an AMD CPU and GPU more. Even with all the innovations AMD is bringing to mobile such as Ryzen AI, AMD's market share in mobile remains limited compared to its solid progress in the desktop and server market.Despite all the technical progress with Ryzen, AMD continues to struggle to build a cohesive ecosystem in the mobile space, at least compared to Intel. Chipzilla's Evo platform has locked in customer loyalty by setting standards for premium laptops, while AMD's lack of a comparable certification makes it harder for OEMs to market to consumers in the high-end mobile segment. These challenges highlight that while AMD has succeeded in many areas, there are hurdles Su needs to overcome.Personnel changes over the decadeThere have been a string of personnel changes under Su, not all of which worked out smoothly. One critical figure that left was Jim Keller, among the main architects at AMD, who departed in 2015 after helping with AMD's CPU resurgence. While the Zen team successfully carried the roadmap forward, Keller's exit meant AMD lost one of its most renowned engineers.Another key architect was Mike Clarke, a central figure in AMD's CPU design team and known as the "father of Zen," who also stepped away from the company for a brief period before returning to help spearhead the Zen family. Clarke's absence created temporary instability, but his return helped reinforce AMD's ability to deliver on its roadmap.On the graphics side, Raja Koduri, who led the Radeon Technologies Group, resigned from AMD in late 2017 to join Intel. Koduri had been instrumental in helping reorganize AMD's graphics division and was key in initiating the RDNA architecture. He exited just as AMD was beginning to regain traction in the GPU market. While RDNA was well under way and became pivotal in helping AMD be more competitive, AMD at this time was still struggling to close the graphics leadership gap with Nvidia in both the gaming and AI markets. It is possible Koduri's departure disrupted AMD's momentum in the graphics space.Other notable departures include Mike Rayfield, who left AMD's embedded and Pro segment back in 2019.However, AMD managed to retain Forrest Norrod, who first joined in 2014 after a 13-year tenure at Dell. Norrod is a key figure within the Epyc and server leadership team and has played a large part in AMD's datacenter and server ambitions.Crucial to AMD's core graphics leadership is Jack Huynh, a 20-plus-year company veteran who was appointed senior VP and GM of computing and graphics last year. When pressed about whether AMD's success in the datacenter would pull focus away from efforts on gaming and graphics lines, Huynh appeared to say that AMD would not try to compete for a piece of the flagship pie. He told Tom's Hardware in September: "My number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10 percent of the TAM [total addressable market] or 80 percent? I'm an 80 percent kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy."A decade of ups and downsThe past ten years haven't been without missteps for the company, but there has definitely been a step change as far as growth is concerned. AMD is delivering successful product after product, not just in the desktop market, but in mobile and datacenter too.Latest figures show AMD chipping away at Intel's CPU dominanceREAD MOREIn terms of market share, it is starting to make real strides. Back in 2014, AMD's market share in desktop was down to around 20 percent, whereas now it sits around 29 percent, as The Register reported earlier this month. The Intel challenger has gained almost ten percentage points compared to a year ago from 19.2 percent in Q3 2023 to 28.7 percent in Q3 this year, half of which came during the last quarter.All-inclusive market data from Mercury Research showed that AMD currently ships around a quarter of all x86 chips including not just server and desktop CPUs, but IoT chips and semi-custom products used in kit like game consoles.The biggest win for AMD of late is its market share in the server space, where formerly it had no presence whatsoever. Now it stands around 24 percent, a major improvement, and, with Epyc's dominance in core count compared to Intel, is sure to help push this even higher in the years to come. Su noted in the company's most recent earnings call for Q3 2024: "Epyc has become the CPU of choice for the modern datacenter and our multi-generation product portfolio delivers leadership performance and significant [total cost of ownership] advantages across virtually every enterprise and cloud workload."It will have to watch out. As we wrote, it wasn't just AMD that experienced significant growth in server CPU shipments, Chipzilla did too. Intel saw gains in both datacenter and networking/communications segments, according to Mercury. The analyst observed: "Due to very similar growth rates, AMD saw only a near-negligible increase in total share, and we note that Intel's Xeon SP shipment growth slightly outpaced AMD's Epyc as Intel's NEX shipments recovered."There is everything to play for.