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IMO AMD is really going to shine when they release the server version of Ryzen (Naples). Ryzen was great and certainly delivered on performance and price but it

IMO AMD is really going to shine when they release the server version of Ryzen (Naples). Ryzen was great and certainly delivered on performance and price but it still gets beat by Intel in applications which are no heavily multi-threaded. In the server space, there are many almost entirely parallel applications where this advantage will be even better.

nodesocket 9y ago
Who's going to buy and deploy those chips though? Don't AWS, Google, Azure use Intel exclusively and I assume have lock-in contracts? The exception are GPU's, which AMD (NVIDIA) has some cloud penetration[1] but still lots of work left to do. [1] https://cloud.google.com/gpu/ https://cloud.google.com/gpu/
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  They might, but I'm sure there are a ton of large companies that run their own datacenters or at least operate their own bare-metal servers (e.g., Dropbox, OVH). It would at least be a start for AMD.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    There are also still plenty of businesses that have their own hardware on the 0s - 10s of servers scale. They are going to be much more cost sensitive, so AMD could really shine there.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  At the kinds of scale the big cloud operators buy and build at, I bet each watt of TDP probably costs them six figures a year. If Ryzen has real advantages in the server room, they'll figure out a way to deploy it, I doubt they're foolish enough to lock themselves into one supplier irrevocably.
- hueving 9y ago
  Companies that care about privacy or cost enough not to put stuff on the cloud?
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    Sorry, but those types of companies don't move the needle in terms of top and bottom lines for $AMD as a company.
    - hueving 9y ago
      Companies that care about cost massively move the needle. Competent large corporations without massively dynamic workloads still build datacenters.
- WatchDog 9y ago
  Google were buying opteron back in 2006. Granted their stack is more larger and much more complex now, they might consider amd again if the performance and the price is right. At the very least, it should force some deep discounts by intel.
  - simcop2387 9y ago
    Actually at google's scale I'd expect them to also be looking heavily at Power/Performance which AMD seems to have an edge on in the consumer Ryzen's. That alone might be worth it for them to start buying.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      Frankly, Ryzen's efficiency improvements are marketing nonsense. The only way they hit their TDP numbers is at single-core loads, under a full-CPU load they have fairly similar performance-per-watt to Broadwell-E. Of course that's on consumer chips with higher clocks for gaming - the math might be different when we get it down closer to 2 GHz. Anecdote time: my 5820K (4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltage) pulls 92W during a Handbrake encode. It pulls ~140W during a Prime95 run. I think that's roughly comparable to what 6C Ryzen is pulling at equivalent clocks - if not less. I just built a Xeon E5-2650v3 ES (10C at 2.3 GHz all-core) system last week for video encoding ($60 mobo from MicroCenter, $150 processor off eBay, threw the rest together from parts). It pulls 60W doing the same encodes, and hits roughly the same framerates. Single-thread performance is pretty bad though.
      - mtanski 9y ago
        Used Intel Xeon processor can be a great value... however, no enterprise is going to buy old engineering sample processors for their data centers.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        paulmd 9y ago
- cptskippy 9y ago
  If Backblaze is an indicator of large cloud provider spending habits then AMD will be given a thorough examination. Their annual HDD Reliability Reports show that while they may favor a vendor, they definitely do not put all of their eggs in one basket.
- sengork 9y ago
  Separate to cloud providers, there is a whole market for home servers, especially storage/NAS devices. AMD could tap into this, not only the datacenter.
- nl 9y ago
  Google at least has hedged Intel domination by building PowerPC servers themselves. I doubt any major provider would have a 100% lock-in contract. It would be more likely they would contract for XXXX servers per year, where XXXX is some percentage of their likely demand.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    This is all speculation of course, and if anybody actually knows that would be awesome. I think it is totally believable and reasonable that Intel would have exclusivity clauses in their contracts with the "big 3" cloud providers.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      I suspect you've asked a bad question. It should be obvious that anyone who does know such a thing could not share it since it would violate any kind of NDA or basic 'secret sauce' / leverage based competitive advantages agreements they would have surely signed as even basic employment.
    - nl 9y ago
      The PowerPC thing isn't speculation[1]. Intel doesn't have the market power to demand exclusive contracts - the big 3 can just say "no" and what would Intel do? Intel didn't need exclusive contracts: they simply had a much better CPU, cheaper. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374
searchfaster 9y ago
Agree, I am waiting for powerful, yet cost-effective bare metal servers.
jsz0 9y ago
It's going to be tough for AMD to claw their way back into this market anytime soon. The market for low-end to mid-range servers has been on the decline for a while and the explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off too.
- alpha_squared 9y ago
  > the explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off too Any reports on this? I work in the cloud space and that's not what I'm seeing at all, I think we're at least still a few years out from leveling off.
- eberkund 9y ago
  Who says they aren't going to be high end servers? If their server lineup is anything like Ryzen it will well surpass what Intel is offering in performance.
- deelowe 9y ago
  > explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off Got a source for that? I work in the industry and I'm not seeing this at all.
  - jsz0 9y ago
    IDC seems to think so. I think they have a pretty good track record. From a user perspective it feels right to me because it's easier than ever to scale on demand and otherwise manage cloud resources efficiently. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/server_market_shrinks/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/server_market_shrin...
ksec 9y ago
Intel's gross margin is 60%. And That is including consumers and lower end product like Pentium. I am willing to bet their Server product are at least 70%+ margin. Which means a lot of room for AMD to strike. The problem is, what if Intel react and lower their Margin. Hence their Mobile and DC First for 10nm. Having said that, lowering Margin is easier said then done. There will be immense pressure from shareholders and investors. It will be interesting to see how this story unfold. Of course GF is also working on 7nm ( similar to Intel 10nm ), but Intel's 10nm still has a year lead.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I don't know about the PC Pentium chip, but on laptop Celerons and Pentiums Intel must have like 100%-150% margin. Those are not Core chips anymore (since post-Haswell). They are Atom chips, which Intel used to make for $30-$50, which the company is now selling for $100-$150. Making such rip-off chips is one of the reasons why they merged the mobile business and the PC business, so they can show higher profitability "overall" for the division (especially since Intel used to subsidize the mobile chips, in order to compete). Intel's process advantage used to be more like 3 years. It's now down to 1 year. This happened for two reasons: the other foundries reached FinFET, too (Intel was 2 years ahead just from FinFET alone before), and Moore's Law slowed down first for Intel, allowing the rest to catch-up (and it's now slowing down for them, too). However, even with Intel's one year advantage, AMD could use Intel's chip building strategy to best it. What do I mean? I'm talking about how Intel will build server chips first on 10nm, and PC and laptop chips later. If AMD starts building 7nm laptop APUs ASAP before Intel puts out its 10nm laptop chips, AMD could actually be seen as the "better option" overall in laptops (not just in value, in which they will be the winner anyway, but in pure performance). Intel has also signaled in other ways (other than the 10nm strategy) that it will start fading out of the PC market to focus on "more profitable" server/machine learning markets, because there's not much for it to gain from the shrinking or at best stagnant PC market where it has 90% market share. However, AMD could grow from 10% or whatever it has now to at least 50% in the next 5-7 years, if it plays its cards right. The only question is how interested they are in the PC market, too, because they may also chase the more profitable server/machine learning markets first. I'm not going to say with confidence that this is a mistake. They may need to focus on that at least partially to become profitable (which they haven't been for years), but I think it would be a better strategic move for AMD and for its image, if it started "conquering" the PC market first, before worrying about "what's the more profitable strategy." If I were at AMD, I would probably worry more about Qualcomm in the PC market for the next few years (unless Windows on ARM is still a catastrophe, but I have a feeling it won't be, and that regular users in emerging markets won't notice a difference at that Celeron/Pentium level of performance). And the reason for that is that I suspect that even with AMD's sever cost-cutting over the past few years, Qualcomm's ARM chips may still be more profitable to build at a higher margin, which may mean that Qualcomm's chips could offer better value in budget laptops than either AMD or Intel. But that should be revealed to us in the next year or two at most.
drewg123 9y ago
I'm excited and looking forward to Ryzen. I can't wait to see how well it performs for us as a CDN server. However, I'm concerned about the heavily NUMA nature of even a single socket system (4 dies per package, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/11183/amd-prepares-32-core-naples-cpus-for-1p-and-2p-servers-coming-in-q2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11183/amd-prepares-32-core-nap...). Depending on the bandwidth of the on-package interconnect, things could either be just fine, or it could be a non-starter. Part of the problem is FreeBSD just not being very NUMA aware. A less obvious part of the problem is even if FreeBSD was NUMA aware, we'd still have problems with files read off storage on node 0 having to exit the system via a 100GbE NIC on node1, etc.

nodesocket 9y ago

Who's going to buy and deploy those chips though? Don't AWS, Google, Azure use Intel exclusively and I assume have lock-in contracts? The exception are GPU's, which AMD (NVIDIA) has some cloud penetration[1] but still lots of work left to do. [1] https://cloud.google.com/gpu/ https://cloud.google.com/gpu/

Cyph0n 9y ago
They might, but I'm sure there are a ton of large companies that run their own datacenters or at least operate their own bare-metal servers (e.g., Dropbox, OVH). It would at least be a start for AMD.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  There are also still plenty of businesses that have their own hardware on the 0s - 10s of servers scale. They are going to be much more cost sensitive, so AMD could really shine there.
Analemma_ 9y ago
At the kinds of scale the big cloud operators buy and build at, I bet each watt of TDP probably costs them six figures a year. If Ryzen has real advantages in the server room, they'll figure out a way to deploy it, I doubt they're foolish enough to lock themselves into one supplier irrevocably.
hueving 9y ago
Companies that care about privacy or cost enough not to put stuff on the cloud?
- nodesocket 9y ago
  Sorry, but those types of companies don't move the needle in terms of top and bottom lines for $AMD as a company.
  - hueving 9y ago
    Companies that care about cost massively move the needle. Competent large corporations without massively dynamic workloads still build datacenters.
WatchDog 9y ago
Google were buying opteron back in 2006. Granted their stack is more larger and much more complex now, they might consider amd again if the performance and the price is right. At the very least, it should force some deep discounts by intel.
- simcop2387 9y ago
  Actually at google's scale I'd expect them to also be looking heavily at Power/Performance which AMD seems to have an edge on in the consumer Ryzen's. That alone might be worth it for them to start buying.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    Frankly, Ryzen's efficiency improvements are marketing nonsense. The only way they hit their TDP numbers is at single-core loads, under a full-CPU load they have fairly similar performance-per-watt to Broadwell-E. Of course that's on consumer chips with higher clocks for gaming - the math might be different when we get it down closer to 2 GHz. Anecdote time: my 5820K (4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltage) pulls 92W during a Handbrake encode. It pulls ~140W during a Prime95 run. I think that's roughly comparable to what 6C Ryzen is pulling at equivalent clocks - if not less. I just built a Xeon E5-2650v3 ES (10C at 2.3 GHz all-core) system last week for video encoding ($60 mobo from MicroCenter, $150 processor off eBay, threw the rest together from parts). It pulls 60W doing the same encodes, and hits roughly the same framerates. Single-thread performance is pretty bad though.
    - mtanski 9y ago
      Used Intel Xeon processor can be a great value... however, no enterprise is going to buy old engineering sample processors for their data centers.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - paulmd 9y ago
cptskippy 9y ago
If Backblaze is an indicator of large cloud provider spending habits then AMD will be given a thorough examination. Their annual HDD Reliability Reports show that while they may favor a vendor, they definitely do not put all of their eggs in one basket.
sengork 9y ago
Separate to cloud providers, there is a whole market for home servers, especially storage/NAS devices. AMD could tap into this, not only the datacenter.
nl 9y ago
Google at least has hedged Intel domination by building PowerPC servers themselves. I doubt any major provider would have a 100% lock-in contract. It would be more likely they would contract for XXXX servers per year, where XXXX is some percentage of their likely demand.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  This is all speculation of course, and if anybody actually knows that would be awesome. I think it is totally believable and reasonable that Intel would have exclusivity clauses in their contracts with the "big 3" cloud providers.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    I suspect you've asked a bad question. It should be obvious that anyone who does know such a thing could not share it since it would violate any kind of NDA or basic 'secret sauce' / leverage based competitive advantages agreements they would have surely signed as even basic employment.
  - nl 9y ago
    The PowerPC thing isn't speculation[1]. Intel doesn't have the market power to demand exclusive contracts - the big 3 can just say "no" and what would Intel do? Intel didn't need exclusive contracts: they simply had a much better CPU, cheaper. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374

searchfaster 9y ago

Agree, I am waiting for powerful, yet cost-effective bare metal servers.

jsz0 9y ago

It's going to be tough for AMD to claw their way back into this market anytime soon. The market for low-end to mid-range servers has been on the decline for a while and the explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off too.

alpha_squared 9y ago
> the explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off too Any reports on this? I work in the cloud space and that's not what I'm seeing at all, I think we're at least still a few years out from leveling off.
eberkund 9y ago
Who says they aren't going to be high end servers? If their server lineup is anything like Ryzen it will well surpass what Intel is offering in performance.
deelowe 9y ago
> explosive growth from cloud providers is starting to level off Got a source for that? I work in the industry and I'm not seeing this at all.
- jsz0 9y ago
  IDC seems to think so. I think they have a pretty good track record. From a user perspective it feels right to me because it's easier than ever to scale on demand and otherwise manage cloud resources efficiently. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/server_market_shrinks/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/server_market_shrin...

ksec 9y ago

Intel's gross margin is 60%. And That is including consumers and lower end product like Pentium. I am willing to bet their Server product are at least 70%+ margin. Which means a lot of room for AMD to strike. The problem is, what if Intel react and lower their Margin. Hence their Mobile and DC First for 10nm. Having said that, lowering Margin is easier said then done. There will be immense pressure from shareholders and investors. It will be interesting to see how this story unfold. Of course GF is also working on 7nm ( similar to Intel 10nm ), but Intel's 10nm still has a year lead.

mtgx 9y ago
I don't know about the PC Pentium chip, but on laptop Celerons and Pentiums Intel must have like 100%-150% margin. Those are not Core chips anymore (since post-Haswell). They are Atom chips, which Intel used to make for $30-$50, which the company is now selling for $100-$150. Making such rip-off chips is one of the reasons why they merged the mobile business and the PC business, so they can show higher profitability "overall" for the division (especially since Intel used to subsidize the mobile chips, in order to compete). Intel's process advantage used to be more like 3 years. It's now down to 1 year. This happened for two reasons: the other foundries reached FinFET, too (Intel was 2 years ahead just from FinFET alone before), and Moore's Law slowed down first for Intel, allowing the rest to catch-up (and it's now slowing down for them, too). However, even with Intel's one year advantage, AMD could use Intel's chip building strategy to best it. What do I mean? I'm talking about how Intel will build server chips first on 10nm, and PC and laptop chips later. If AMD starts building 7nm laptop APUs ASAP before Intel puts out its 10nm laptop chips, AMD could actually be seen as the "better option" overall in laptops (not just in value, in which they will be the winner anyway, but in pure performance). Intel has also signaled in other ways (other than the 10nm strategy) that it will start fading out of the PC market to focus on "more profitable" server/machine learning markets, because there's not much for it to gain from the shrinking or at best stagnant PC market where it has 90% market share. However, AMD could grow from 10% or whatever it has now to at least 50% in the next 5-7 years, if it plays its cards right. The only question is how interested they are in the PC market, too, because they may also chase the more profitable server/machine learning markets first. I'm not going to say with confidence that this is a mistake. They may need to focus on that at least partially to become profitable (which they haven't been for years), but I think it would be a better strategic move for AMD and for its image, if it started "conquering" the PC market first, before worrying about "what's the more profitable strategy." If I were at AMD, I would probably worry more about Qualcomm in the PC market for the next few years (unless Windows on ARM is still a catastrophe, but I have a feeling it won't be, and that regular users in emerging markets won't notice a difference at that Celeron/Pentium level of performance). And the reason for that is that I suspect that even with AMD's sever cost-cutting over the past few years, Qualcomm's ARM chips may still be more profitable to build at a higher margin, which may mean that Qualcomm's chips could offer better value in budget laptops than either AMD or Intel. But that should be revealed to us in the next year or two at most.

drewg123 9y ago

I'm excited and looking forward to Ryzen. I can't wait to see how well it performs for us as a CDN server. However, I'm concerned about the heavily NUMA nature of even a single socket system (4 dies per package, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/11183/amd-prepares-32-core-naples-cpus-for-1p-and-2p-servers-coming-in-q2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11183/amd-prepares-32-core-nap...). Depending on the bandwidth of the on-package interconnect, things could either be just fine, or it could be a non-starter. Part of the problem is FreeBSD just not being very NUMA aware. A less obvious part of the problem is even if FreeBSD was NUMA aware, we'd still have problems with files read off storage on node 0 having to exit the system via a 100GbE NIC on node1, etc.