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IMHO server marketshare is much more fickle than the consumer one. For consumers, compatibility is a big issue and hard to switch unless a myriad of things wor
by PeterisP 5y ago
IMHO server marketshare is much more fickle than the consumer one.
For consumers, compatibility is a big issue and hard to switch unless a myriad of things work properly.
For servers, if just a single commonly used system (e.g. mariadb or wordpress) works and you can do it 10% cheaper, companies can replace large quantities of hardware to a completely different architecture.
- loeg 5y agoServer marketshare has been fairly sticky -- despite AMD offering low-risk, same ISA migration, and attractive pricing, the server market was relatively slow to adopt Zen.
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoOTOH, new HPC systems have been quick to adopt Zen in the form of dual-socket EPYC nodes. Actually if you look at the current top 10 supercomputers, only 2 are Intel. The rest are custom ARM or RISC CPUs (in Japan and China), IBM Power9, or AMD EPYC.
- freemint 5y agoHPC is a special industry in that regard. HPC is know to take well managed technical risks such as building custom CPUs (A64FX in Fugaku) or using less popular architectures (SPARC, Power). If one can be certain that with enough coding hours codes can be adapted to run on those platforms and they will end up faster more exotic hardware will be bought or considered. Nation level HPC projects are not conservative, Industrial HPC maybe a bit more so.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoMy take at this is because of inertia. I have a large fleet of servers that have been Intel since forever. I see no reason to migrate them today as things work reasonably well. We upgrade the hardware every 4-5 years. So during the next upgrade for sure I'll choose AMD, there is no question of that. ARM will be a serious competitor and RISC-V, too, that's for sure - but they are just not there yet when we talk about maximum performance (in our case, energy consumption is not the main concern)
- foota 5y agoI think this is largely just lag between orders for new xen parts and the capacity coming online. I would expect to see a lot of xen processors in fleets being built today.
- loeg 5y ago> I think this is largely just lag between orders for new xen parts and the capacity coming online. That may be a piece of it, but I think there's a little more. AMD released the first generation of Epyc processors in June 2017. They didn't see much adoption for years.[1] [1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vono9miWH83ZVeqRfE9CCV-970-80.png.webp https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vono9miWH83ZVeqRfE9CCV-970...
- ksec 5y ago>the server market was relatively slow to adopt Zen. Is this finally an accepted truth now? I have been banging on about it for years that AMD are not doing good enough on Server. They will still gain a little more market share with Zen 4, but now Intel is coming back. The perfect opportunity windows is closing down.
- bubblethink 5y agoAMD doesn't have any product to go around. And this was true even before covid.
- eecc 5y agoYeah, but big companies have long lifecycle and bundling contracts that makes them more resistant to change.
- PeterisP 5y agoI was thinking about the fact that more and more companies are renting compute from e.g. AWS - so for them switching to a different architecture can be as easy as changing a single parameter in a config file, if the cloud provider offers it a bit cheaper.