Intel says PC market is ‘a tale of two kingdoms’ with mainstream ‘taking a beating’ — VP suggests a split between mainstream and enthusiast sockets across the industry

Intel’s Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of the enthusiast channel business, believes that the consumer market will see a split in sockets for mainstream and enthusiast platforms to address the rising costs of PCs for cash-strapped buyers. Tom’s Hardware Premium recently spoke with the technical marketing leader about the state of the PC market, which Hallock described as a “tale of two kingdoms.”

“I think the market’s experiencing a tale of two kingdoms. For the folks who have a significant amount of discretionary budget, they can absorb the cost impacts of what’s going on in the industry, and most other people cannot,” Hallock said. “And that’s having a very different impact, as you can imagine, on different parts of the market. Low-end, mainstream is really taking a beating. Enthusiast and premium, not so bad. You could, depending on the device class, maybe even [say] growing positive. So it’s a very starkly divided market at the moment.”

Hallock’s take on the market is interesting. The doom and gloom of the RAM and NAND shortages is omnipresent, but we’ve also seen very expensive launches despite that. Gigabyte launched the $5,300 RTX 5090 Infinity OC in June. Asus demoed its 20th anniversary ROG lineup at the same time, which includes a $3,300 motherboard and CPU cooler bundle, as well as a $6,000 RTX 5090. Saying the enthusiast market is growing given the current market conditions may be a stretch, but RAM prices haven’t killed it — an extra $300 or $400 in RAM in the context of a $5,000 PC doesn’t really move the needle.

That’s not the majority of the market, however, and presumably, those few high spenders aren’t enough to sustain a business at the scale of Intel. We’ve already seen concessions in hardware to reach buyers during the memory shortage, particularly in laptops, with the MacBook Neo, Intel’s own Wildcat Lake, and the newly-detailed Snapdragon C. On the desktop, we’ve seen AMD re-release the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and introduce the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. Intel has sold off its new Arrow Lake Refresh chips at much lower prices than expected, with the new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus recently dropping to just $155 in a limited-time sale.

On desktop, at least, these seem like short-term measures. Hallock suggests that, going forward, there will be a more clear divide between mainstream and enthusiast platforms, not just at Intel, but across the industry if prices don’t let up.

“I truly believe that what the market is going to see going forward, and this is just like an industry-level comment… and I want to stress this is not just Intel. You’re probably going to see a split. You’ll have a premium socket and a mainstream socket from everybody,” Hallock said. “If you’re playing in desktop space, that is probably what you’ll do because the supply chain costs, the upstream costs, the same costs that are currently harming the entry-level and mainstream market, I don’t see those abating anytime soon.”

AMD has stressed in its previous two earnings calls that gaming revenue, in particular, is declining due to higher component costs. In Intel’s most recent earnings, it reported revenue in its client business up 13% year-over-year, though clarified that was due to higher average selling price, not increased unit sales, because of “some inflation on our cost and [needing] to pass that on to the end customer,” said Intel’s chief financial officer David Zinsner during the earnings call at the time.

Hallock buttoned up the point clearly: “You’re going to have to make some concessions in your product stack, and that’s purely to control costs and give people an option that they can actually afford. Otherwise, if you don’t do it, the other alternative is it just disappears because it’s unaffordable.”

It seems for Intel that the socket split looks like LGA 1700 for mainstream and LGA 1954 for enthusiasts, though Hallock didn’t say that explicitly. In June, Tom’s Hardware first reported on “Raptor Lake Next,” which is supposedly a third refresh to Intel’s Raptor Lake lineup set for early 2027. Hallock didn’t confirm the range to us, though he said that Raptor Lake remains a “core part of the portfolio” that he wants to offer “for years to come.”

LGA 1954 is the socket that Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake CPUs will use. There’s a lot of anticipation surrounding Nova Lake, not only due to the lackluster reception of Arrow Lake, but also the various rumors that have swirled around the range, including the introduction of bLCC as a 3D V-Cache competitor and a 52-core flagship, neither of which have been confirmed by Intel.

Although a lot is riding on Nova Lake, Hallock was clear that, given the current market, it won’t appeal to everyone. “A product like Nova Lake cannot address every single slice of the market. It just can’t, given the current market that we’re in,” Hallock said. “But I do hope and do believe that people will look back and go, ‘Damn, you know, that was pretty freaking good.’ That’s what we’re hoping for.”

You can read the transcript of the full interview at our Tom’s Hardware Premium site.