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AMD records its highest server market share in decades

jmakov 2y ago
Will be interesting to see how Intel recovers if at all. Actually, is there today (or since 1 or 2 years) any reason to go with Intel on desktop or server?
- ISV_Damocles 2y ago
  I personally only use AMD (excepting one test machine), but Intel does have the best single-thread performance[1] so if you have some crufty code that you can't parallelize in any way, it'll work best with Intel. [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html#section-single-threaded-cpu-benchmarks-rankings-2024 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html...
  - Rohansi 2y ago
    Unless your workloads are not very cache optimized like most games, then AMD's 3D V-cache CPUs take the lead.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The new Zen 5 has a much better single-thread performance than any available Intel CPU. For instance a slow 5.5 GHz Zen 5 matches or exceeds a 6.0 GHz Raptor Lake in single-thread performance. The faster Zen 5 models, which will be launched in a couple of days, will beat easily any Intel. Nevertheless, in a couple of months Intel will launch Arrow Lake S, which will have a very close single-thread performance to Zen 5, perhaps very slightly higher. Because Arrow Lake S will be completely made by TSMC, it will have a much better energy efficiency than the older Intel CPUs and also than AMD Zen 5, because it will use a superior TSMC "3 nm" process. On the other hand, it is expected to have the same maximum clock frequency as AMD Zen 5, so its single thread performance will no longer be helped by a higher clock frequency, like in Raptor Lake.
    - listic 2y ago
      > in a couple of months Intel will launch Arrow Lake S, which will have a very close single-thread performance to Zen 5 Will they? Intel Innovation event was postponed "until 2025"[1], so I assumed there is not going to be any big launch like that in 2024, anymore? Arrow Lake S was supposed to debut at Intel Innovation event in September [2] [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-series/innovation.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-seri... [2] https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-says-raptor-lake-microcode-update-will-not-affect-overclocking-and-performance-new-arrow-lake-battlemage-updates https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-says-raptor-lake-microcode...
      - adrian_b 2y ago
        The Intel Innovation event was canceled to save money. This has nothing to do with the actual launch of future products, which are expected to bring more money. Intel can make a cheap on-line product launch, like most such launches after COVID. Since the chips of Arrow Lake S are made at TSMC and Intel does only packaging and testing, like also for Lunar Lake, there will be no manufacturing problems. The only thing that could delay the Arrow Lake S launch would be a bug so severe that it would require a new set of masks. For now there is no information about something like this.
- etempleton 2y ago
  For some specific workloads. Many people in the Plex community will point to Quicksync as being superior for media encoding than anything that AMD offers. The next couple of years will be interesting. If Intel can pull off 18a they will very likely retake the lead, however if 18a underwhelms Intel will be in real trouble. There is also the possibility that AMD chooses Intel as a fab in the future, which would feel a bit like when Sonic showed up on a Nintendo console (for some reason it just feels wrong).
  - darknavi 2y ago
    I was going to say Quicksync. I just spec'd and bought a new server build and the igpus on a few year old Intel chips is hard to beat for price and tdp.
  - russelg 2y ago
    The quicksync preference seems mostly to be because up until the 7000 series, AMD didn't even include integrated graphics on their chips (meaning no video encoder) (barring the G variants). I would think the grounds are much more even now.
- epolanski 2y ago
  I think Intel still takes the crown when it comes to maximizing every single fps. Also, for a while, it was more competitive in the mid range than AMD's equivalent from a price/performance point of view.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    This is where I think AMD really messed up on the current releases... If they'd called the 9600X a 9400 and the 9700X a 9600X, and charged like $100 less, I think the reception would have been much stronger. As it stands, it's more about wait and see. You can use PBO and get like 10-15% more performance at double the energy, but even then compared to the rest of the market, it just comes up short. The 9800X3D and 9950X(3D) options will really carry this cycle if they're good and the pricing adapts appropriately. I'm not holding my breath. I've been holding on with my 5950X since it's release and likely going to continue unless the 9950X(3D) is compelling enough. Not to mention the DDR5 memory issues with larger sizes or more sticks. 96gb is probably enough, but at what cost.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The 9600X and 9700X are not a useful upgrade for gamers, but they are excellent for anyone else. Their energy efficiency is much better that for any previous x86 CPUs and for those who use applications that benefit from AVX-512 the desktop Zen 5 brings an increase in throughput higher than for any new CPU of the last five years (the last time when a desktop CPU had a double throughput over its predecessors was in 2019, with Zen 2 over Coffee Lake Refresh). Also in the applications like Web browsers or MS Office, which prefer single-thread performance, they beat even the top Raptor Lake Refresh of 6.0 GHz, which is much more expensive and it consumes a power several times greater. Moreover, as shown by TechPowerUp, the performance of Zen 5 under Windows is suboptimal in comparison with Intel in the programs that use a small number of active threads, like the games, because the Windows scheduler uses a policy that favors power savings over performance, even if that is a bad choice for a desktop CPU. That means that the scheduler prefers to make both threads of a core active, while keeping idle the other cores, even if the right policy (which is used on Intel) is to begin to use the second threads of the cores only after all the cores have one active thread. This should be easy to correct in the Windows scheduler, which does the right thing for Intel, where first one thread is made active on each P-core, the all the E-cores are made active, and only if more active threads are required the second threads of the P-cores are made active too.
- treprinum 2y ago
  N100 & N305 have no competition in their own space IMO. For the rest I don't see any advantage outside momentum and "nobody is going to be fired for using IBM" approach.
  - hangonhn 2y ago
    This is fine for Intel actually. What really matters for the fortunes of Intel is their foundry service now. Intel could very well make those chips for NVidia if they can figure out the foundry service.
- foobiekr 2y ago
  Strategically, in global terms from a US-centric point of view, it would be very good if Intel could recover, as having the entire world reliant on TSMC would be bad for everyone. Also there really isn't any other org like Intel at the moment in the broader sense in a few ways (mostly advanced research). That said, Intel really has nothing to fall back on. Internally, it is very much like many of the other big companies - run by executive whim papered over with justifications that are tissue thin. There are a lot of companies like this - Cisco, Intel, whatever the hell is left of IBM, Nokia, Lattice, NetApp, etc. - that will probably die this decade if they fail to reboot their executive and managerial cultures. I have a lot of friends who have been in the great parts of Intel (the CPU design teams and, believe it or not, fabrication) and the crap parts (everything else, especially networking and storage [what's left of it], except maybe the perenially suffering ICC team). Pat has failed to make things materially better because the system that is the body of Intel is resilient to disruptions of the sort he is trying. A massive replacement and flattening of culture is required there and he has not been able to execute on it. Turnover is coming for all the companies I list above. If I had to go out on a limb and suggest a longterm survivor from the list above, it might be Lattice. Otherwise everyone listed is driving hard straight to the ground internally, whether the market sees it or not.
  - Miraste 2y ago
    IBM has been heading toward the ground for thirty years, and they never seem to hit it. Whatever problems they have, they are both diversified and deeply entrenched in all kinds of government and S&P 500 systems and processes, to the point that their performance barely matters. Intel doesn't have anything like that to paper over their deficiencies.
    - robotnikman 2y ago
      Plenty of places still running AS/400 on crazy high support contracts, and no plans of moving on.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        > crazy high Not high enough that it can't go higher. Maybe somebody should make a betting site around when the next order-of-magnitude increase on the rent of AS/400 hardware will come. With 6 months granularity. IMO, the people without a plan are crazy. But yeah, there's plenty of them.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  At some price points and for some scenarios, or if a particular pre-built has everything you need for the right price and happens to have Intel, sure there are plenty of situations where Intel is the right choice. It is amazing to see how Intel has faltered. This was all laid in stone a decade ago when Intel was under delusions that its biggest competitor was itself, and the only thing it cared about was ensuring that their lower power and lower cost devices didn't compete with their cash-cow high end products. They optimized for the present and destroyed their future.
- wmf 2y ago
  Intel could come back once all their chips are on 3 nm later this year.
scrapcode 2y ago
Is there any indication at all that this is due to businesses bringing their hardware back on-prem? Do you think "history repeats itself" will hold true in the on-prem v. cloud realm?
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Anecdotally it seems like the rose-tinted glasses are coming off in terms of the amount of money and work saved by moving towards the cloud. Of course those aren't the only reasons to move to the cloud. But a lot of companies moved to the cloud due to promises and expectations that didn't pan out, so at least some of them moving back is only natural. Especially with many new solutions around private cloud and serverless allowing them to bring the "good parts" of the cloud to hardware they own or rent. That's just the normal hype cycle playing out.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Why do you believe that could be a related phenomenon? How much server market is going to non-cloud vs. cloud? Some analysts estimate the global server market last year at $95 to $150 billion. AWS spent $48 billion on capital last year. Google bought $32 billion in capital, most of which is "on-prem" from their perspective. A switch in the machine-of-the-day from Intel to AMD at one of these large buyers could easily cause the slight change in market share mentioned in the article. Overall I think a lot of people continue to underestimate the size of the heavy hitters on the buy side of the server market.
  - scrapcode 2y ago
    Why wouldn't it be a viable reason? Every customer that AWS and Google have has the potential to make that decision and I believe it gets more appetizing with every data breach / funnel failure / etc.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      Every indicator we have is that movement to the cloud is a massive tidal wave, and all we have on the retreat to on-prem is a handful of anecdotes and vibes. It's really up to the proponent of such an argument to provide some evidence for the extraordinary claim that return to on-prem is signifiant enough to influence server market share (or even establish that such revanchists would prefer AMD more than cloud buyers do).
treprinum 2y ago
Still wondering how AMD has only ~25% of desktop market share given recent Intel issues.
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  Because Intel is still top dog when it comes to single threaded performance even against Zen 5.
  - treprinum 2y ago
    Yeah, but that's at the cost of a 50% probability of a CPU failure within a year. Moreover, it doesn't hold true in games vs X3D CPUs.
    - bugbuddy 2y ago
      That’s hyperbole. There’s no data to back such a claim.
      - Cold_Miserable 2y ago
        Indeed. Intel is trash right now. No AVX512 thus AMD is infinitely faster.
        bugbuddy 2y ago
        Define infinitely
- belval 2y ago
  Well there are several reasons: - Intel is still competitive for gaming and productivity (albeit at a somewhat higher power consumption) - AMD does not have a good budget offering (competing with i3 at ~120$) - People don't refresh their desktop as often as a laptop, especially for gaming where realistically an i7-7700k from 2017 coupled with a modern GPU will comfortably output 60fps+ at 1440p.
nickdothutton 2y ago
I would be amazed if Intel has completely abandoned the kind of business practices they are famous for, and were fined (circa $1.5 billion) for WRT systems builders/retailers.
- wmf 2y ago
  It usually takes 5-10 years for the evidence to come out. Whatever anti-competitive practices they're using now don't seem to be working very well.
albertopv 2y ago
Soon migrating part of DC to Oracle Cloud (don't ask...), a consultancy firm will do the job, all VM will be on AMD CPUs.
cletus 2y ago
It's hard to believe it's been roughly two decades since the Athlon/Opteron almost killed Intel, which would've been the last time AMD did so well in server market share. The short version of this story is that Intel licensed the x86 instruction set back in the 90s to several companies including AMD and Cyrix. Intel didn't like this as time went on. First, they couldn't trademark numbers, which is why the 486 went to the Pentium. Second, they didn't want developers producing compatible chips. So Intel entered into a demonic pact with HP to develop EPIC. That's the architecture name. Itanium was the cip. Merced was one of the early code names. This was in the 90s when it wasn't clear if RISC or CISC would dominate. As we now know, this effort was years last, with huge cost overruns and by the time it shipped it was too expensive for too little performance. At the same time, on the consumer front we had the Megahertz Wars. Intel moved from the Pentium-3 to the Pentium-4 that scaled really well with clock speed but wasn't great with IPC. It also had issues with pipelines and failed branch prediction (IIRC). But from a marketing perspective it killed AMD (and Cyrix). Why is this important? Because 64 bit was around the corner and Intel wanted to move the market to EPIC. AMD said to hell with that and released the x84-64 instruction set (which, by the terms of the licensing agreemnt, Intel had a right to use as well) and released the Athlon series of desktop chips, followed later by the Opteron server chips. These were wildly successful. The Pentium-4 hit a clock ceiling of 3-4 GHz, which still pretty much exists today. In the 90s it was thought chips would scale up to 10GHz or beyond by many. What saved Intel? The Pentium-3. You see the Pentium-3 had morphed into a mobile platform because it was very energy efficient. First as Pentium-M and later as Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. This was the Centrino platform. Some early hackers took Centrino boards and built desktops. The parts were hard to get if you weren't a laptop OEM. They probably salvaged laptops. Anyway by the mid to late 2000s, Intel had fully embraced this and it became the Core architecture that has evolved largely ever since to what we have today. But back then Intel was formidable in terms of bringing new smaller processes online. This was a core competency right up until the 10nm transition in the 2010s, which was years late. And TSMC (and even Samsung) came along and ate their lunch. I can't tell you that happened but Intel never recovered, to this day. As for AMD, after a few years they never seemed to capitalize on their Opteron head start. Maybe it was that Intel caught up. I'm not really sure. But they were in the wilderness for probably 10-15 years, right up until Ryzen. Intel needs to be studied for how badly they dropped the bag. Nowadays, their CEO seems to be reduced to quoting the Bible on Twitter [1]. I'm glad to see AMD back. I still believe ARM is going to be a huge player in the coming decade. [1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing-tough-time-ceo-is-now-quoting-bible-on-twitter-2577045-2024-08-05 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing...
lvl155 2y ago
At this point, I am asking why AMD doesn’t buy Intel. Sure, antitrust police will be all over it but it would be an epyc irony for AMD.
foobarian 2y ago
Wait a little more and maybe we won't need to add more choices to AWS amd64 or arm64! :-)
kens 2y ago
The article states that Intel has 75.9% of datacenter CPU shipments and AMD has 24.1%. This implies that ARM has 0% of the server market, which is not the case. I suspect this article neglected to state the important restriction to "*x86* server market", which makes a big difference to the conclusions.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  By unit quantities, yes... by revenue, however, they are nearly neck in neck "While Intel earned $3.0 billion selling 75.9% of data center CPUs (in terms of units), AMD earned $2.8 billion selling 24.1% of server CPUs (in terms of units), which signals that the average selling price of an AMD EPYC is considerably higher than the ASP of an Intel Xeon."
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sammi 2y ago
    If companies are really spending twice the money on amd chips as these numbers imply, then this should mean that a amd server chip has a 2x perceived value compared to an intel one.
    - nicoburns 2y ago
      I think there are AMD chips with twice as many cores as the Intel ones, so this kinda makes sense.
      - timschmidt 2y ago
        Epyc is also vastly ahead of Xeon in terms of number of PCIe lanes provided, which can be critical in many applications.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      Probably depends on the tier of processor too. Not all servers probably need 10k 64/128core CPUs.
Sammi 2y ago
At this point I avoid Intel for the same reason I avoid Boeing.
GeekyBear 2y ago
I'm happy to see an AMD with plenty of income that they can invest in the development of future products. We've seen how little advancement we get when Intel doesn't have effective competition to spur them along.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I'm no Intel fan but the last time that AMD had market leadership and anything which was under Hector Ruiz who is they basically completely stopped innovating. I don't think that'll happen under Lisa, but the track record of AMD and market leadership is they just kind of sit on it. We'll see what happens this time around Of course, last time Intel was still sitting on a metric pile of Fab technology and other stuff that was still in the pipeline. Intel appears a lot more starred for such potential innovations. The path forward appears to be radical ISA switches or something besides yet another x86 node shrink. But Intel's track record for doing anything outside of x86 processors is very very very very poor.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > The path forward appears to be radical ISA switches Why up to this day people still can't make x86 clones? The amd64 architecture is nearly 20 years old, and lots of compilers target ancient processors. What kind of legal protection is there that is lasting for that long? (Anyway, I'm glad RISC-V is taking off.)
    - mlyle 2y ago
      * SSE and other architectural extensions combined with supporting patents * Intellectual property minefields about how to adapt every new micro-architectural innovation to the mess that is x86 architecture. Finally, barriers to entry in developing a competitive processor are fundamentally high. Combining them with the risk of litigation makes it untenable.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    I don't see an ISA switch being worth much. As I understand it today, most cores are basically an ISA interpreter on the front of a bespoke core. There's not much to be gained from using a specific ISA or arch (unless it's so different as to not be the same thing, like GPU vs CPU). Probably they could also go the way of making the guarantees provided by the processor as weak as possible, but that's even harder to switch to, I'd imagine.
more_corn 2y ago
Sometimes all you gotta do to win is stay on your feet when your opponent stumbles.
yamumsafknho 2y ago
[flagged]
somastoma 2y ago
[dead]

Will be interesting to see how Intel recovers if at all. Actually, is there today (or since 1 or 2 years) any reason to go with Intel on desktop or server?

ISV_Damocles 2y ago
I personally only use AMD (excepting one test machine), but Intel does have the best single-thread performance[1] so if you have some crufty code that you can't parallelize in any way, it'll work best with Intel. [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html#section-single-threaded-cpu-benchmarks-rankings-2024 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html...
- Rohansi 2y ago
  Unless your workloads are not very cache optimized like most games, then AMD's 3D V-cache CPUs take the lead.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The new Zen 5 has a much better single-thread performance than any available Intel CPU. For instance a slow 5.5 GHz Zen 5 matches or exceeds a 6.0 GHz Raptor Lake in single-thread performance. The faster Zen 5 models, which will be launched in a couple of days, will beat easily any Intel. Nevertheless, in a couple of months Intel will launch Arrow Lake S, which will have a very close single-thread performance to Zen 5, perhaps very slightly higher. Because Arrow Lake S will be completely made by TSMC, it will have a much better energy efficiency than the older Intel CPUs and also than AMD Zen 5, because it will use a superior TSMC "3 nm" process. On the other hand, it is expected to have the same maximum clock frequency as AMD Zen 5, so its single thread performance will no longer be helped by a higher clock frequency, like in Raptor Lake.
  - listic 2y ago
    > in a couple of months Intel will launch Arrow Lake S, which will have a very close single-thread performance to Zen 5 Will they? Intel Innovation event was postponed "until 2025"[1], so I assumed there is not going to be any big launch like that in 2024, anymore? Arrow Lake S was supposed to debut at Intel Innovation event in September [2] [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-series/innovation.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-seri... [2] https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-says-raptor-lake-microcode-update-will-not-affect-overclocking-and-performance-new-arrow-lake-battlemage-updates https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-says-raptor-lake-microcode...
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The Intel Innovation event was canceled to save money. This has nothing to do with the actual launch of future products, which are expected to bring more money. Intel can make a cheap on-line product launch, like most such launches after COVID. Since the chips of Arrow Lake S are made at TSMC and Intel does only packaging and testing, like also for Lunar Lake, there will be no manufacturing problems. The only thing that could delay the Arrow Lake S launch would be a bug so severe that it would require a new set of masks. For now there is no information about something like this.
etempleton 2y ago
For some specific workloads. Many people in the Plex community will point to Quicksync as being superior for media encoding than anything that AMD offers. The next couple of years will be interesting. If Intel can pull off 18a they will very likely retake the lead, however if 18a underwhelms Intel will be in real trouble. There is also the possibility that AMD chooses Intel as a fab in the future, which would feel a bit like when Sonic showed up on a Nintendo console (for some reason it just feels wrong).
- darknavi 2y ago
  I was going to say Quicksync. I just spec'd and bought a new server build and the igpus on a few year old Intel chips is hard to beat for price and tdp.
- russelg 2y ago
  The quicksync preference seems mostly to be because up until the 7000 series, AMD didn't even include integrated graphics on their chips (meaning no video encoder) (barring the G variants). I would think the grounds are much more even now.
epolanski 2y ago
I think Intel still takes the crown when it comes to maximizing every single fps. Also, for a while, it was more competitive in the mid range than AMD's equivalent from a price/performance point of view.
- tracker1 2y ago
  This is where I think AMD really messed up on the current releases... If they'd called the 9600X a 9400 and the 9700X a 9600X, and charged like $100 less, I think the reception would have been much stronger. As it stands, it's more about wait and see. You can use PBO and get like 10-15% more performance at double the energy, but even then compared to the rest of the market, it just comes up short. The 9800X3D and 9950X(3D) options will really carry this cycle if they're good and the pricing adapts appropriately. I'm not holding my breath. I've been holding on with my 5950X since it's release and likely going to continue unless the 9950X(3D) is compelling enough. Not to mention the DDR5 memory issues with larger sizes or more sticks. 96gb is probably enough, but at what cost.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The 9600X and 9700X are not a useful upgrade for gamers, but they are excellent for anyone else. Their energy efficiency is much better that for any previous x86 CPUs and for those who use applications that benefit from AVX-512 the desktop Zen 5 brings an increase in throughput higher than for any new CPU of the last five years (the last time when a desktop CPU had a double throughput over its predecessors was in 2019, with Zen 2 over Coffee Lake Refresh). Also in the applications like Web browsers or MS Office, which prefer single-thread performance, they beat even the top Raptor Lake Refresh of 6.0 GHz, which is much more expensive and it consumes a power several times greater. Moreover, as shown by TechPowerUp, the performance of Zen 5 under Windows is suboptimal in comparison with Intel in the programs that use a small number of active threads, like the games, because the Windows scheduler uses a policy that favors power savings over performance, even if that is a bad choice for a desktop CPU. That means that the scheduler prefers to make both threads of a core active, while keeping idle the other cores, even if the right policy (which is used on Intel) is to begin to use the second threads of the cores only after all the cores have one active thread. This should be easy to correct in the Windows scheduler, which does the right thing for Intel, where first one thread is made active on each P-core, the all the E-cores are made active, and only if more active threads are required the second threads of the P-cores are made active too.
treprinum 2y ago
N100 & N305 have no competition in their own space IMO. For the rest I don't see any advantage outside momentum and "nobody is going to be fired for using IBM" approach.
- hangonhn 2y ago
  This is fine for Intel actually. What really matters for the fortunes of Intel is their foundry service now. Intel could very well make those chips for NVidia if they can figure out the foundry service.
foobiekr 2y ago
Strategically, in global terms from a US-centric point of view, it would be very good if Intel could recover, as having the entire world reliant on TSMC would be bad for everyone. Also there really isn't any other org like Intel at the moment in the broader sense in a few ways (mostly advanced research). That said, Intel really has nothing to fall back on. Internally, it is very much like many of the other big companies - run by executive whim papered over with justifications that are tissue thin. There are a lot of companies like this - Cisco, Intel, whatever the hell is left of IBM, Nokia, Lattice, NetApp, etc. - that will probably die this decade if they fail to reboot their executive and managerial cultures. I have a lot of friends who have been in the great parts of Intel (the CPU design teams and, believe it or not, fabrication) and the crap parts (everything else, especially networking and storage [what's left of it], except maybe the perenially suffering ICC team). Pat has failed to make things materially better because the system that is the body of Intel is resilient to disruptions of the sort he is trying. A massive replacement and flattening of culture is required there and he has not been able to execute on it. Turnover is coming for all the companies I list above. If I had to go out on a limb and suggest a longterm survivor from the list above, it might be Lattice. Otherwise everyone listed is driving hard straight to the ground internally, whether the market sees it or not.
- Miraste 2y ago
  IBM has been heading toward the ground for thirty years, and they never seem to hit it. Whatever problems they have, they are both diversified and deeply entrenched in all kinds of government and S&P 500 systems and processes, to the point that their performance barely matters. Intel doesn't have anything like that to paper over their deficiencies.
  - robotnikman 2y ago
    Plenty of places still running AS/400 on crazy high support contracts, and no plans of moving on.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > crazy high Not high enough that it can't go higher. Maybe somebody should make a betting site around when the next order-of-magnitude increase on the rent of AS/400 hardware will come. With 6 months granularity. IMO, the people without a plan are crazy. But yeah, there's plenty of them.
llm_nerd 2y ago
At some price points and for some scenarios, or if a particular pre-built has everything you need for the right price and happens to have Intel, sure there are plenty of situations where Intel is the right choice. It is amazing to see how Intel has faltered. This was all laid in stone a decade ago when Intel was under delusions that its biggest competitor was itself, and the only thing it cared about was ensuring that their lower power and lower cost devices didn't compete with their cash-cow high end products. They optimized for the present and destroyed their future.
wmf 2y ago
Intel could come back once all their chips are on 3 nm later this year.

scrapcode 2y ago

Is there any indication at all that this is due to businesses bringing their hardware back on-prem? Do you think "history repeats itself" will hold true in the on-prem v. cloud realm?

wongarsu 2y ago
Anecdotally it seems like the rose-tinted glasses are coming off in terms of the amount of money and work saved by moving towards the cloud. Of course those aren't the only reasons to move to the cloud. But a lot of companies moved to the cloud due to promises and expectations that didn't pan out, so at least some of them moving back is only natural. Especially with many new solutions around private cloud and serverless allowing them to bring the "good parts" of the cloud to hardware they own or rent. That's just the normal hype cycle playing out.
jeffbee 2y ago
Why do you believe that could be a related phenomenon? How much server market is going to non-cloud vs. cloud? Some analysts estimate the global server market last year at $95 to $150 billion. AWS spent $48 billion on capital last year. Google bought $32 billion in capital, most of which is "on-prem" from their perspective. A switch in the machine-of-the-day from Intel to AMD at one of these large buyers could easily cause the slight change in market share mentioned in the article. Overall I think a lot of people continue to underestimate the size of the heavy hitters on the buy side of the server market.
- scrapcode 2y ago
  Why wouldn't it be a viable reason? Every customer that AWS and Google have has the potential to make that decision and I believe it gets more appetizing with every data breach / funnel failure / etc.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Every indicator we have is that movement to the cloud is a massive tidal wave, and all we have on the retreat to on-prem is a handful of anecdotes and vibes. It's really up to the proponent of such an argument to provide some evidence for the extraordinary claim that return to on-prem is signifiant enough to influence server market share (or even establish that such revanchists would prefer AMD more than cloud buyers do).

treprinum 2y ago

Still wondering how AMD has only ~25% of desktop market share given recent Intel issues.

bugbuddy 2y ago
Because Intel is still top dog when it comes to single threaded performance even against Zen 5.
- treprinum 2y ago
  Yeah, but that's at the cost of a 50% probability of a CPU failure within a year. Moreover, it doesn't hold true in games vs X3D CPUs.
  - bugbuddy 2y ago
    That’s hyperbole. There’s no data to back such a claim.
    - Cold_Miserable 2y ago
      Indeed. Intel is trash right now. No AVX512 thus AMD is infinitely faster.
      - bugbuddy 2y ago
        Define infinitely
belval 2y ago
Well there are several reasons: - Intel is still competitive for gaming and productivity (albeit at a somewhat higher power consumption) - AMD does not have a good budget offering (competing with i3 at ~120$) - People don't refresh their desktop as often as a laptop, especially for gaming where realistically an i7-7700k from 2017 coupled with a modern GPU will comfortably output 60fps+ at 1440p.

nickdothutton 2y ago

I would be amazed if Intel has completely abandoned the kind of business practices they are famous for, and were fined (circa $1.5 billion) for WRT systems builders/retailers.

wmf 2y ago
It usually takes 5-10 years for the evidence to come out. Whatever anti-competitive practices they're using now don't seem to be working very well.

albertopv 2y ago

Soon migrating part of DC to Oracle Cloud (don't ask...), a consultancy firm will do the job, all VM will be on AMD CPUs.

cletus 2y ago

It's hard to believe it's been roughly two decades since the Athlon/Opteron almost killed Intel, which would've been the last time AMD did so well in server market share. The short version of this story is that Intel licensed the x86 instruction set back in the 90s to several companies including AMD and Cyrix. Intel didn't like this as time went on. First, they couldn't trademark numbers, which is why the 486 went to the Pentium. Second, they didn't want developers producing compatible chips. So Intel entered into a demonic pact with HP to develop EPIC. That's the architecture name. Itanium was the cip. Merced was one of the early code names. This was in the 90s when it wasn't clear if RISC or CISC would dominate. As we now know, this effort was years last, with huge cost overruns and by the time it shipped it was too expensive for too little performance. At the same time, on the consumer front we had the Megahertz Wars. Intel moved from the Pentium-3 to the Pentium-4 that scaled really well with clock speed but wasn't great with IPC. It also had issues with pipelines and failed branch prediction (IIRC). But from a marketing perspective it killed AMD (and Cyrix). Why is this important? Because 64 bit was around the corner and Intel wanted to move the market to EPIC. AMD said to hell with that and released the x84-64 instruction set (which, by the terms of the licensing agreemnt, Intel had a right to use as well) and released the Athlon series of desktop chips, followed later by the Opteron server chips. These were wildly successful. The Pentium-4 hit a clock ceiling of 3-4 GHz, which still pretty much exists today. In the 90s it was thought chips would scale up to 10GHz or beyond by many. What saved Intel? The Pentium-3. You see the Pentium-3 had morphed into a mobile platform because it was very energy efficient. First as Pentium-M and later as Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. This was the Centrino platform. Some early hackers took Centrino boards and built desktops. The parts were hard to get if you weren't a laptop OEM. They probably salvaged laptops. Anyway by the mid to late 2000s, Intel had fully embraced this and it became the Core architecture that has evolved largely ever since to what we have today. But back then Intel was formidable in terms of bringing new smaller processes online. This was a core competency right up until the 10nm transition in the 2010s, which was years late. And TSMC (and even Samsung) came along and ate their lunch. I can't tell you that happened but Intel never recovered, to this day. As for AMD, after a few years they never seemed to capitalize on their Opteron head start. Maybe it was that Intel caught up. I'm not really sure. But they were in the wilderness for probably 10-15 years, right up until Ryzen. Intel needs to be studied for how badly they dropped the bag. Nowadays, their CEO seems to be reduced to quoting the Bible on Twitter [1]. I'm glad to see AMD back. I still believe ARM is going to be a huge player in the coming decade. [1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing-tough-time-ceo-is-now-quoting-bible-on-twitter-2577045-2024-08-05 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing...

lvl155 2y ago

At this point, I am asking why AMD doesn’t buy Intel. Sure, antitrust police will be all over it but it would be an epyc irony for AMD.

foobarian 2y ago

Wait a little more and maybe we won't need to add more choices to AWS amd64 or arm64! :-)

kens 2y ago

The article states that Intel has 75.9% of datacenter CPU shipments and AMD has 24.1%. This implies that ARM has 0% of the server market, which is not the case. I suspect this article neglected to state the important restriction to "*x86* server market", which makes a big difference to the conclusions.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
By unit quantities, yes... by revenue, however, they are nearly neck in neck "While Intel earned $3.0 billion selling 75.9% of data center CPUs (in terms of units), AMD earned $2.8 billion selling 24.1% of server CPUs (in terms of units), which signals that the average selling price of an AMD EPYC is considerably higher than the ASP of an Intel Xeon."
- deleted 2y ago
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- Sammi 2y ago
  If companies are really spending twice the money on amd chips as these numbers imply, then this should mean that a amd server chip has a 2x perceived value compared to an intel one.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    I think there are AMD chips with twice as many cores as the Intel ones, so this kinda makes sense.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      Epyc is also vastly ahead of Xeon in terms of number of PCIe lanes provided, which can be critical in many applications.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    Probably depends on the tier of processor too. Not all servers probably need 10k 64/128core CPUs.

Sammi 2y ago

At this point I avoid Intel for the same reason I avoid Boeing.

GeekyBear 2y ago

I'm happy to see an AMD with plenty of income that they can invest in the development of future products. We've seen how little advancement we get when Intel doesn't have effective competition to spur them along.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I'm no Intel fan but the last time that AMD had market leadership and anything which was under Hector Ruiz who is they basically completely stopped innovating. I don't think that'll happen under Lisa, but the track record of AMD and market leadership is they just kind of sit on it. We'll see what happens this time around Of course, last time Intel was still sitting on a metric pile of Fab technology and other stuff that was still in the pipeline. Intel appears a lot more starred for such potential innovations. The path forward appears to be radical ISA switches or something besides yet another x86 node shrink. But Intel's track record for doing anything outside of x86 processors is very very very very poor.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > The path forward appears to be radical ISA switches Why up to this day people still can't make x86 clones? The amd64 architecture is nearly 20 years old, and lots of compilers target ancient processors. What kind of legal protection is there that is lasting for that long? (Anyway, I'm glad RISC-V is taking off.)
  - mlyle 2y ago
    * SSE and other architectural extensions combined with supporting patents * Intellectual property minefields about how to adapt every new micro-architectural innovation to the mess that is x86 architecture. Finally, barriers to entry in developing a competitive processor are fundamentally high. Combining them with the risk of litigation makes it untenable.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  I don't see an ISA switch being worth much. As I understand it today, most cores are basically an ISA interpreter on the front of a bespoke core. There's not much to be gained from using a specific ISA or arch (unless it's so different as to not be the same thing, like GPU vs CPU). Probably they could also go the way of making the guarantees provided by the processor as weak as possible, but that's even harder to switch to, I'd imagine.

more_corn 2y ago

Sometimes all you gotta do to win is stay on your feet when your opponent stumbles.

yamumsafknho 2y ago

[flagged]

somastoma 2y ago

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