Yes, that's a good point. The sharing of hardware over the internet (aka the 'cloud') is the most critical market here. Though, I think there's a lot of cross p

Yes, that's a good point. The sharing of hardware over the internet (aka the 'cloud') is the most critical market here. Though, I think there's a lot of cross pollination between cloud and HPC markets - if AMD is financially successful with Zen they'll be able to pour more R&D money into fortifying their position. The question is of course whether that's going to be enough - Intel came back and beat out all competition after their last big loss of market share (~2005, 95nm process spawning AMD64 / Opteron). I'd argue that the Intel of 2018 is not the Intel of 2005. From what I'm hearing/reading, they've had an ongoing brain drain from being too much focused on short term profits versus taking real risks in developing new technologies as well as putting up the finances to actually secure and test their cash cows.