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AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space
- seanp2k2 2y agoTherefore, AMD stock is down 17.1% in the past month.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 2y agoInterpretation notes: first time, in the era during which said companies broke out "datacenter" as a reporting category. The last time AMD was clearly on top in terms of product quality, they reported 2006 revenue of $5.3 billion for microprocessors while Intel reported $9.2 billion in the same category. In those years the companies incompletely or inconsistently reported separate sales for "server" or "enterprise".
- gautamcgoel 2y agoDamn, first Intel missed out on Mobile, then it fumbled AI, and now it's being seriously challenged on its home turf. Pat has his work cut out for him.
- jsheard 2y agoNot to mention that ARM keeps closing in on their ISA moat via Apple, Ampere, Graviton and so on. Their last bastion is the fact that Microsoft keeps botching Windows for ARM every time they try to make it happen.
- DanielHB 2y agoNot so much with the latest ARM windows laptops
- pjmlp 2y agoNot really Microsoft, rather the Windows developer ecosystem, backwards compatibility is the name of the game in PC land, and as such there is very little value to add additional development costs to support ARM alongside x86, for so little additional software sales. Apple doesn't matter beyond its 10% market share, they don't target servers any more. Ampere is a step away to be fully owned by Oracle, I bet most HN ARM cheering crowd is blessifuly unaware of it. Graviton is only relevant for AWS customers.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago> seriously challenged on its home turf. Is it? I presume that a large chunk of the AMD's $3.5B is MI3XX chips, and very little of Intel's $3.5B is AI, so doesn't that mean that Xeon likely still substantially outsells EPYC?
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agonot necessarily. in the past 5 years, the x86 monopoly in the server world has broken. arm chips like graviton are a substantial fraction (20%?) of the server CPU market.
- rafaelmn 2y agoHis work now boils down to prepping Intel for an acquisition.
- Wytwwww 2y agoBy whom though? I don't see how any company directly competing with Intel (or even orthogonal e.g. Nvidia and ARM) could be allowed to by Intel (they'd need approval in the US/EU and presumably a few other places) unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy?
- shiroiushi 2y ago>unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy? This may be in the cards.
- saywhanow 2y agoIIRC Intel and AMD have a patent sharing agreement that dissolves if either is purchased.
- rafaelmn 2y agoThat's just a thing that needs to be renegotiated - highly doubt these two are getting into a patent war given the state of x86. Unless Intel gets acquired by a litigious company to go after AMD :shrug:
- tonyhart7 2y agoGov would bail out intel or amd lol, this would negate American tech dominance and would try to prevent that
- cheema33 2y agoIntel has come back recently with a new series of "Lunar Lake" CPUs for laptops. They are actually very good. For now, Intel has regained the crown for Windows laptops. Maybe Pat has lit the much needed fire under them.
- pantalaimon 2y agoThe only ugly (for Intel) detail being that they are fabbed by TSMC
- hollandheese 2y agoSnapdragon X Plus/Elite is still faster and has better battery life. Lunar Lake does have a better GPU and of course better compatibility.
- hajile 2y agoX Elite is faster, but not enough to offset the software incompatibility or dealing with the GPU absolutely sucking. Unfortunately for Intel, X Elite was a bad CPU that has been fixed with Snapdragon 8 Elite's update. The core uses a tiny fraction of the power of X Elite (way less than the N3 node shrink would offer). The core also got a bigger frontend and a few other changes which seem to have updated IPC. Qualcomm said they are leading in performance per area and I believe it is true. Lunar Lake's P-core is over 2x as large (2.2mm2 vs 4.5mm2) and Zen5 is nearly 2x as large too at 4.2mm2 (Even Zen5c is massively bigger at 3.1mm2). X Elite 2 will either be launching with 8 Elite's core or an even better variant and it'll be launching quite a while before Panther Lake.
- pityJuke 2y agoWorth noting, > Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won’t have baked-on memory. “It’s not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake,” said Gelsinger on Intel’s Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.[0] [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-lake-one-off-memory-package-discrete-gpu https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-...
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoThey didn't miss out. They owned the most desirable mobile platform in StrongARM and cast it aside. They are the footgun masters.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hajile 2y agoThey killed StrongARM because they believed the x86 Atom design could compete. Turns out that it couldn't and most of the phones with it weren't that great. Intel should be focused on an x86+RISC-V hybrid chip design where they can control an upcoming ecosystem while also offering a migration path for businesses that will pay the bills for decades to come.
- kimixa 2y agoI'd argue that the Atom core itself could compete - it hit pretty much the same perf/watt targets as it's performance-competitive ARM equivalents. But having worked with Intel on some of those SoCs, it's everything else that fell down. They were late, they were the "disfavored" teams by execs, they were the engineer's last priority, they had stupid hw bugs they refused to fix and respin, they were everything you could do to set up a project to fail.
- RussianCow 2y ago> They were late This was the main thing, as by that point, all native code was being compiled to Arm and not x86. Using x86 meant that some apps, libraries, etc just didn't work.
- mkl 2y agoIntel and Google developed libhoudini to do binary translation of the native code to solve that problem. https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge, https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-th..., http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-native-x86-code.html?m=1 http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-nativ...
- nine_k 2y agoYou forgot the 10 nm / 7 nm node troubles that continued for years and held back their CPU architectures (which honestly kept improving).
- bloody-crow 2y agoSurprising it took so long given how dominant the EPYC CPUs were for years.
- j_walter 2y agoServer companies have long term agreements in place...waiting for those to expire before moving to AMD is not unexpected. This was the final outcome expected by many.
- jsheard 2y agoNobody ever got fired for buying Intel.
- ginko 2y agoThey should be.
- speed_spread 2y agoBut some caught on fire by standing too close.
- browningstreet 2y agoThat’s not a thing.
- acdha 2y agoOne thing to remember is that the enterprise space is very conservative: AMD needed to have server-grade CPUs for all of the security and management features on the market long enough for the vendors to certify them, promise support periods, etc. and they need to get the enterprise software vendors to commit as well. The public clouds help a lot here by trivializing testing and locking in enough volume to get all of the basic stuff supported, and I think that’s why AMD was more successful now than they were in the Opteron era.
- parl_match 2y agoComplicated. Performance per watt was better for Intel, which matters way more when you're running a large fleet. Doesn't matter so much for workstations or gamers, where all that matters is performance. Also, certification, enterprise management story, etc was not there. Maybe recent EPYC had caught up? I haven't been following too closely since it hasn't mattered to me. But both companies were suggesting an AMD pass by. Not surprising at all though, anyone who's been following roadmaps knew it was only a matter of time. AMD is /hungry/.
- iwontberude 2y agoI am sure AMD has been delivering more value for even longer. I bet the currently deployed AMD Exaflops are significantly higher than Intel. It was a huge consideration for me when shopping between the two. As big as 50% more compute per dollar.
- SilverBirch 2y agoI’d still like a decent first fpga. Guys? I’m still here guys! Please make me some FPGAs!
- jsheard 2y agoSorry, you can have a cheap-ish FPGA that came out 10 years ago, or a new FPGA that costs more than your car and requires a $3000 software license to even program. Those are the only options allowed.
- Neywiny 2y agoThe new COP FPGAs are in the $100-400 range. Not cheap but nothing compared to the high end parts.
- RF_Savage 2y agoSo Intel has abandoned the sub-100usd segment to AMD/Xilinx, Lattice, Efinix and Microchip?
- bgnn 2y agoLuckily they are spinning off the FPGA business to be Altera again
- Neywiny 2y agoThe COP is AMD/Xilinx. I have no idea what the agilex 3 and 5 costs are, I'm not an Altera user. I will note though, having used Lattice, Microchip, and (admittedly at the start of Titanium) Efinix, none of the tools come close to Vivado/Vitis. I'm on lattice at the moment and I've lost countless hours to the tools not working or working poorly on Linux relative to Xilinx. Hobbyist me doesn't care, I'll sink the hours in. Employee me does care, though.
- namibj 2y agoThere's also Cologne Chip.
- WaitWaitWha 2y agoOh my, allow me to reminisce. When the Intel 80386-33 came out we thought it was the pinnacle of CPUs, running our Novell servers! We now had a justification to switch from arcnet to token ring. Our servers could push things way faster! Then, in the middle 1991, the AMD 80386-40 CPU came out. Mind completely blown! We ordered some (I think) Twinhead motherboards. They were so fast we could only use Hercules mono cards in them; all other video cards were fried. 16Mb token ring was out, so some of my clients moved to it with the fantastic CPU. I have seen some closet-servers running Novell NetWare 3.14 (?) with that AMD CPU in the late '90s. There was a QUIC tape & tape drive in the machine that was never changed for maybe a decade? The machine never went down (or properly backed up).
- p1esk 2y ago[flagged]
- taspeotis 2y agoSome AMD 80386DX-40 drama: > While the AM386 CPU was essentially ready to be released prior to 1991, Intel kept it tied up in court.[2] Intel learned of the Am386 when both companies hired employees with the same name who coincidentally stayed at the same hotel, which accidentally forwarded a package for AMD to Intel's employee.[3]
- firecall 2y agoFar out LOL That's amazing!
- justinclift 2y agoWonder if the hotel had a liability problem from that? After all, it sounds like they directly caused a "billion dollar" type of problem for AMD through their mistake.
- intothemild 2y agoI remember that 386-40. That was a great time.
- 2y ago
- pixelpoet 2y agoPlease, don't talk about how well AMD is doing! You'll only make the stock price slide another 10%, as night follows day... [irrational market grumbling intensifies]
- belval 2y agoThe market can hardly be called irrational on this. AMD's market value pretty much already priced in that they would take over Intel's place in the datacenter, their valuation is more than double Intel's with a PE of 125, despite them being fabless and ARM gaining ground in the server space. That's why you are seeing big swings in prices, because anything short of "we are bankrupting Intel and fighting Nvidia in the AI accelerator space" is seen as a loss.
- dhruvdh 2y ago> despite them being fabless That's not how it works. You need to pump money into fabs to get them working, and Intel doesn't have money. If AMD had fabs to light up their money, they would also have a much lower valuation. The market is completely irrational on AMD. Their 52-week high is ~225$ and 52-week low is ~90$. 225$ was hit when AMD was guiding ~3.5B in datacenter GPU revenue. Now, they're guiding to end the year at 5B+ datacenter GPU revenue, but the stock is ~140$? I think it's because of how early Nvidia announced Blackwell (it isn't any meaningful volume yet), and the market thinks AMD needs to compete with GB200 while they're actually competing with H200 this quarter. And for whatever reason the market thinks that AMD will get zero AI growth next year? I don't know how to explain the stock price. Anyway, they hit record quarterly revenue this Q3 and are guiding to beat this record by ~1B next quarter. Price might move a lot based on how AMD guides for Q1 2025.
- belval 2y ago> That's not how it works. Being fabless does have an impact because it caps AMD's margins and makes x86 their only moat. They can only extract value if they remain competitive on price. Sure that does not impact Nvidia, but they get to have fat margins because they have virtually no competition. > The market is completely irrational on AMD. Their 52-week high is ~225$ and 52-week low is ~90$. That's volatility not irrationality. As I wrote AMD's valuation is built on the basis that they will keep executing in the DC space, Intel will keep shitting the bed and their MI series will eventually be competitive with Nvidia. These facts make investor skittish and any news about AMD causes the stock to move. > the market thinks AMD needs to compete with GB200 while they're actually competing with H200 this quarter. And for whatever reason the market thinks that AMD will get zero AI growth next year? The only hyperscaler that picked up MI300X is Azure and they GA'ed it 2 weeks ago, both GCP and Azure are holding off. The uncertainty on when (if) it will catch on is a factor but the growing competition from those same hyperscaler building their own chip means that the opportunity window could be closing. It's ok to be bullish on AMD the same way that I am bearish on it, but I would maintain that the swings have nothing to do with irrationality.
- hasnain99 2y agogreag
- INTPenis 2y agoI'm not a HW guy but my HW friends have been designing HCI solutions with AMD for maximum IO throughput because AMD CPUs have more PCI lanes.
- storrgie 2y agoI think for _most_ people it comes down to this: how much can I cram into the platform. More lanes is more high speed storage, special purpose processing, and networking interfaces.
- wmf 2y agoVMware users are starting to say that Epyc is too powerful for one server because they don't want to lose too much capacity due to a single server failure. Tangentially related, network switch ASICs also have too much capacity for a single rack.
- Havoc 2y agoIsn't that ahead of schedule? Everyone I think knew AMD is catching up but thought this was still a year or two out
- DeathArrow 2y agoIf Nvidia releases a good server CPU, they can eat into both Intel and AMD profits. Maybe it's not as lucrative as selling GPUs but having a good portion of the market may pay bigger dividends in the future. If I were AMD CEO I would make the top priority to have a software stack on par with CUDA so that AMD GPUs have a chance in the data centers.
- fvv 2y agoshe already said that more than 1y ago : https://www.eetimes.com/rocm-is-amds-no-1-priority-exec-says/ https://www.eetimes.com/rocm-is-amds-no-1-priority-exec-says...
- ssijak 2y agoSo AMD is first in datacenters and grows AI related chips quarter over quarter. And with PS 5 pro launching hopefully that will grow again their custom graphics chips sales. Looks like a solid buy for me at the moment.
- Narishma 2y agoPS5 Pro is a niche expensive system for enthusiasts. It won't be selling a ton.
- snakeyjake 2y agoExcept for some very, VERY, specific use cases (many of which are now irrelevant due to Optane's death) it is professionally negligent to recommend intel in the datacenter.