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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, w
by 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 agoThey 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 agoThere 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 agoAt 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 agoCompanies that care about privacy or cost enough not to put stuff on the cloud?
- nodesocket 9y agoSorry, but those types of companies don't move the needle in terms of top and bottom lines for $AMD as a company.
- hueving 9y agoCompanies that care about cost massively move the needle. Competent large corporations without massively dynamic workloads still build datacenters.
- WatchDog 9y agoGoogle 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 agoActually 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 agoFrankly, 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.
- cptskippy 9y agoIf 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 agoSeparate 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 agoGoogle 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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