8 ms·

Fascinating that AMD is not dominating in the arena of servers: That's where I would've expected the biggest adoption. They're generally more affordable than I

• gnarbarian 5y ago
  long-running existing contracts is my guess
• karavelov 5y ago
  > PerformanceTest software only runs on Windows OS I think this excludes huge population of servers as we know Windows is not dominant there.
  • mey 5y ago
    How many people outside of a homelab/lab going to run a performance test suite on a fleet of servers? The sample size must be interestingly skewed. This may be more useful information for the server market, even if old. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-q3-2020-cpu-market-share-report https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-q3-2020-cpu-m...
    • lumost 5y ago
      It’s pretty common actually. A server buy can easily be an 8 figure deal, getting servers that turn out to be stupidly configured for your apps that your stuck with for 5 years is exceptionally dumb.
      • mey 5y ago
        I should've emphasized lab before of homelab. Agree, doing a full stack hardware validation (managed to even get a full multi-vendor stack deployed into a Dell validation colo to do our internal performance test). Even then, we only ran out own performance tests, as we cared about our workload, not a generic workload suite. Edit: Additionally, we only did that work on a single set of systems prior to purchase, not the systems post purchase, so 1 of N, instead of rerunning on N. It was presumed that performance would remain the same on same hardware configuration etc.
        • wumpus 5y ago
          That's a telling edit. It's easy to misconfigure a few machines, or have an OS update hurt performance of your entire fleet.
    • wumpus 5y ago
      When I had a fleet of servers, I ran a performance test suite after every boot to make sure the machine was OK.
  • qw3rty01 5y ago
    Are you sure? Statista has windows at a 71% server market share in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/915085/global-server-share-by-os/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/915085/global-server-sha... Edit: Because people seem to think that the numbers are made up, here's some more sources with not quite as high, but similarly dominant numbers: Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-server-market https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-... - microsoft @ 49% in 2017 t4: https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-share https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-sh... - microsoft @ 47% in 2018
    • sacomo 5y ago
      I wonder if this only considers the OS that a server was shipped with? Which is typically nuked as soon as the customer receives it.
      • qw3rty01 5y ago
        This may be true for small companies, but larger businesses tend to use windows due to support contracts.
        • dragonwriter 5y ago
          Larger companies have no problems finding people to pay to support Linux, or if they are really large (say, Amazon), supporting it themselves and being who people (including big companies) pay to support and host Linux systems.
        • MobiusHorizons 5y ago
          it all depends on size. some larger (typically older) companies with smaller engineering teams will make the tradeoff you are describing. But the big players today, who manage hundreds of thousands to millions of servers are not going to pay per machine / per core license counts for support. They build and maintain most of their own software for their own needs.
      • Symbiote 5y ago
• CyberRage 5y ago
  Actually it makes a lot of sense. Some of the reasons include: - Stable\known CPUs, most vendors are used to Intel. - Infrastructure\Support, Intel has a lot more infrastructure to support customers\contracts - Long cycles, servers are more complex to replace and contracts can span multiple years. - Compatibility, many rely on Intel specific features or are afraid to try their solution on a different CPU vendor. - Relationships\Market Share, Intel still is a far bigger brand with more prestige
  • pclmulqdq 5y ago
    Intel CPUs are also a bit more flexible on the high end: if you want 12T of RAM in one machine, you still need an Intel 8-socket machine. I wonder if this is costing AMD a bit in the server space.
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      I don't think that's too important. Scaling that much on a single server is economically rather bad and we're talking about mid 6 digits per Server. If it's in any way posse, and it usually is, you'll probably want to scale horizontally. These servers sure exist, but I highly doubt they make up a large share of the market.
• shwestrick 5y ago
  There's a lot of caveats on this data. It's only showing the ratio of people submitting reports through their benchmark software, which apparently only runs on Windows. So, that makes it sound like the entire space of Linux servers is excluded. I'm just speculating here, but it feels to me like they're just not accurately measuring the market share for servers.
  • arp242 5y ago
    Purely anecdotally, it's been a very long time that I encountered a non-Intel server. I actually wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were roughly in the right ballpark, ±5% or so.
    • lanstin 5y ago
      In AWS I use the AMD whenever I can (faster and cheaper) but they aren’t as available so my terraform either has to get complex logic about A-Z or default to Intel or just use two AZs which is less available.
  • zepearl 5y ago
    I initially thought the exact same thing, but apparently that's not correct: https://www.passmark.com/products/pt_linux/index.php https://www.passmark.com/products/pt_linux/index.php (in any case I cannot run it - needs the ncurses v5 shared library, I have already v6 installed on my AMD server)
• TwoBit 5y ago
  Where I last worked they said it would be hard to switch to AMD quickly because Intel CPUs had a feature set they were dependent on and would take some time/effort to switch.
  • Symbiote 5y ago
    Where I work, we looked at the performance and ordered AMD. I haven't thought about it since, until now.
• dijit 5y ago
  The two main reasons AMD is not dominating is servers right now are: 1) 5 year support contracts 2) OEM unavailability. Even now getting an AMD server is a "go out of your way" situation. Add to the chip shortage and you have people holding on to hardware a bit longer or going intel for availability (those are minor reasons). Anecdotally I just ordered 50 or so AMD servers.
• mark-wagner 5y ago
  Yes, for example in AWS the instance types with "a" appended (AMD EPYC) are lower cost than the corresponding Intel-based instance.
• listic 5y ago
  Must be the inertia. CPUs live long in server space: where I'm looking, server providers offer hardware for rent that is up to 10 years old, and AMD only started to rule CPUs in 2017. E.g. the CPU on the VPS I'm renting is from 2013, and it makes perfect sense that it is form Intel.
• sascha_sl 5y ago
  It will take a long time, but you can still see the uptick. Zen has the potential to take over Intel at least, considering density and pricing, they are exceptional value.
• FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
  AMD sells server chips as quickly as they can make them. They are capacity constrained. https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/04/28/amd-hits-intel-below-the-belt-in-the-datacenter-wallet/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/04/28/amd-hits-intel-below...
  • oblak 5y ago
    Probably why their stock price plummeted
    • comeondude 5y ago
      Price dropped because of xilinix merger
      • pdimitar 5y ago
        Why would it though? This is an honest question, I don't understand stock prices in general btw.
        • FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
          Because they’re buying them for $35 billion. Most likely going to be a drag on future earnings for a little while.
      • oblak 5y ago
        You need to check your timeframe
• ekianjo 5y ago
  production capacity. AMD cant ship nearly as much as they would like.
• jtchang 5y ago
  I buy servers. AMD based ones aren't available. That's it. I am waiting for them to be readily available and at a reasonable price point.
• smoldesu 5y ago
  Intel adds a bunch of software value to their processors that allow them to compete on a different plane than AMD. Kinda like how Apple turns ordinary laptops into objects of desire with proprietary software: Intel does the same thing to datacenters.
  • wumpus 5y ago
    As a user of many servers, I use very little Intel code other than what they've contributed to Linux. Am I missing out? I think I'm a pretty typical hyperscaler.
    • dwrodri 5y ago
      Intel’s MKL + their compiler + their CPUs with the latest SIMD extensions is still one of the best stacks for Scientific programming. Get a scientist to write some single-core kernel in C or C++ language, and that compiler will work serious miracles on code that needs to scale up to hundreds if not thousands of machines (think supercomputers). The game only changed here recently when Nvidia went all in on the server GPU offerings in the past few years, but writing fast CUDA can get much messier than your average biologist would care for. Intel has more software engineers that AMD has employees, so their support for their math libraries, compilers, their GPU drivers, their benchmarking tools, and their contributions to the LLVM ecosystem, the Linux kernel, and other projects have helped them get an iron grip on academic/scientific side of high-performance computing.
      • wumpus 5y ago
        Thanks for the list, I see I didn't really miss anything. BTW, lots of HPC are (again) going for AMD. Hopefully I don't end up getting subpoenaed twice this round! It was a little painful last time.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• willis936 5y ago
  There is a lot of talk of non-performance related drivers of market share here, but I think there is a lot to be said for ISA extensions and libraries. A lot of HPC code relies on AVX512 and MKL.
• martinpw 5y ago
  A couple of observations: - According to the text below the chart, the metric is "CPUs in use rather than CPUs purchased". Assuming servers are replaced after 5 years, and assuming unit sales have not changed massively over that period (big assumptions I know, but just hand waving here...), that would mean each quarter of sales is only 5% of the total being reported here. Now in the past quarter AMD went from 2.5% total market share to 5% total market share. That would mean that AMD had 50% market share of sales in the past quarter (assuming they were selling barely any servers 5 years ago). - Second metric, consider core count rather than CPUs. AMD's biggest CPUs have over the past year or so had 2x the core count of Intel's (64 vs 28) and hyperscalers at least tend to buy the highest core count machines, so if comparing in terms of cores, the weighting shifts even more in AMDs favor. Of course there are plenty of caveats here.
• zepearl 5y ago
  On one hand AMD stuff might still not be too easy to get. In my case I had to wait ~1 month to get a server having a Ryzen 9 5950X (the AX101 here https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax ). I was willing to pre-order & wait indefinitely, other people might want a server "now". On the other hand during the pre-Zen3 era I personally didn't feel an urge to swap from Intel to AMD (I didn't feel like there was a lot of difference of performance/price). This has changed for me with Zen3 so maybe things will change during the next months... .