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> Add that to AMD's recent surge, Intel's in a world of hurt. Meh. Looking at the sales numbers of past quarters, AMD still hasn't significantly hurt Intel. Th

> Add that to AMD's recent surge, Intel's in a world of hurt. Meh. Looking at the sales numbers of past quarters, AMD still hasn't significantly hurt Intel. They have made a lot of inroads among hobbyists and in small-store prebuilts, but the major brands still appear to be dominated by Intel. It's a real shame that nobody seems to have made an actually good Raven Ridge laptop. The CPU is imho objectively better for laptop use than any Intel competitor, but all laptops built with it appear to have a major deficit of some kind or another. Another mystery is lack of Epyc uptake. There are a lot of workloads where Epycs should be dominating Intel server chips when compared at the same price or power level, especially after all the recent chip vulnerabilities which are much less serious for AMD than they are for Intel, but Epyc sales are definitely lagging. Is AMD unable to make them, or are companies just wary of buying AMD?

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
There's a lot of interest in Epyc for certain use cases. It's just the server world moves slowly because when you're spending millions on massive amounts of hardware, and it needs to run 24/7 for years without defects, you want to make sure it works.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Cloud moves slowly because you don't want to force users to redeploy and, once racked, those boxes stay there for a good couple years. In-house ever-expanding large installs are much more agile. Look at how Google adopted POWER, to how Cray is offering ARM nodes in their supercomputers.
- jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
  > It's just the server world moves slowly THIS! I am not sure why people are expecting Epyc to take off like a rocket, it won't. Companies maintaining 24/7 hardware don't jump on new tech. I think Epyc will eventually take a good chunk of the market, but it will take a few years. Also, if you are expanding an existing VMWare stack you can't mix CPU architecture and have HA. So unless you are building a new stack, then Epyc might not even be an option, even if the Admin might prefer Epyc.
dijit 8y ago
So, I work as what is effectively a sysadmin role for a decently large deployment in a decently large company and I can say that we're buying EPYC for some stuff but not everything _yet_. Build farms, where there's a lot of compute needed and it doesn't really matter the reliability of the systems, for instance, have EPYC. Some workstations have Threadripper (nobody has Ryzen) as time goes on, with AMD beating Intel in the middle market, we will expand from builders to VM farms, from VM farms to bare metal hosting, from bare metal hosting to underpinning entire projects. It will take another 2 years of AMD being on top for our company to favour AMD. But I think it's possible.
davidcuddeback 8y ago
> Another mystery is lack of Epyc uptake. AMD and AWS just announced EC2 instances with Epyc processors a few minutes ago: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-blog-starts-9am-pt-5pm-utc https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-b... Edit: Now on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18392834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18392834
pbarnes_1 8y ago
We're looking at moving to Epyc but waiting for Epyc2. Currently on 2 socket Gold 6126's across the board.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago

There's a lot of interest in Epyc for certain use cases. It's just the server world moves slowly because when you're spending millions on massive amounts of hardware, and it needs to run 24/7 for years without defects, you want to make sure it works.

rbanffy 8y ago
Cloud moves slowly because you don't want to force users to redeploy and, once racked, those boxes stay there for a good couple years. In-house ever-expanding large installs are much more agile. Look at how Google adopted POWER, to how Cray is offering ARM nodes in their supercomputers.
jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
> It's just the server world moves slowly THIS! I am not sure why people are expecting Epyc to take off like a rocket, it won't. Companies maintaining 24/7 hardware don't jump on new tech. I think Epyc will eventually take a good chunk of the market, but it will take a few years. Also, if you are expanding an existing VMWare stack you can't mix CPU architecture and have HA. So unless you are building a new stack, then Epyc might not even be an option, even if the Admin might prefer Epyc.

dijit 8y ago

So, I work as what is effectively a sysadmin role for a decently large deployment in a decently large company and I can say that we're buying EPYC for some stuff but not everything _yet_. Build farms, where there's a lot of compute needed and it doesn't really matter the reliability of the systems, for instance, have EPYC. Some workstations have Threadripper (nobody has Ryzen) as time goes on, with AMD beating Intel in the middle market, we will expand from builders to VM farms, from VM farms to bare metal hosting, from bare metal hosting to underpinning entire projects. It will take another 2 years of AMD being on top for our company to favour AMD. But I think it's possible.

davidcuddeback 8y ago

> Another mystery is lack of Epyc uptake. AMD and AWS just announced EC2 instances with Epyc processors a few minutes ago: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-blog-starts-9am-pt-5pm-utc https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-b... Edit: Now on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18392834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18392834

pbarnes_1 8y ago

We're looking at moving to Epyc but waiting for Epyc2. Currently on 2 socket Gold 6126's across the board.