AMD records its highest server market share in decades

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-records-its-highest-server-market-share-in-decades-but-intel-fights-back-in-client-pcs

by giuliomagnifico • 2 years ago

269 159 2 years ago

tomshardware.com

jmakov• 2 years 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• 2 years 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...

Rohansi• 2 years ago

Unless your workloads are not very cache optimized like most games, then AMD's 3D V-cache CPUs take the lead.

adrian_b4• 2 years 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.

etempleton2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

tracker14• 2 years 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.

treprinum7• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

IBM has successfully pivoted to consulting and software solutions these days. It also did $9B in net profit in 2023, while Cisco did $12B in net profit. I'd say that's still pretty healthy.

bgnn• 2 years ago

Oh Nokia is a good example. It's mainly a network infrastructure company now, similar to Cisco, Juniper and Huawei. It's not on the news like Intel but it's dying a similar death. The stories I hear from friends working there reminds me of Intel culture.

IMHO the best outcome for these companies is to go for spin-offs route. Phillips did that with a lot of business units they had and struggle to run (ASML, NXP, their semiconductor fabs etc) and all these businesses turned out to be successful after 4-5 years of tough times. Freshly spun-off companies sometimes went for selling a while project and its dev team to others, or in some cases these projects became spin-offs on their own right. A lot of dead weight (mid-to-high management layers) got fired in the process. It was the right thing to do. Now Phillips is mainly a medical device company, tiny compared to what it used to be, and it is still struggling.

llm_nerd• 2 years 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.

wmf2• 2 years ago

Intel could come back once all their chips are on 3 nm later this year.

scrapcode2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

jeffbee4• 2 years 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.

scrapcode2• 2 years 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.

keyringlight• 2 years ago

One thing I wonder about is whether it's the long term effects of things like spectre/meltdown coming home to roost. I can only speculate as I'm not in the server industry, but IIRC with the mitigations that reduced performance intel benefited a lot with companies buying more servers to make up the shortfall while AMD Zen was still proving itself to what seems like a conservative market. Has the "no one ever got fired for buying X" reputation shifted?

treprinum7• 2 years ago

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

bugbuddy3• 2 years ago

Because Intel is still top dog when it comes to single threaded performance even against Zen 5.

treprinum7• 2 years 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.

belval2• 2 years 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.

Drew_4• 2 years ago

i7-7700k from 2017 coupled with a modern GPU will comfortably output 60fps+ at 1440p

I can say by first hand this is not true for any modern MP game.

In general, I hate these "it does X FPS at Y resolution" claims. They're all so reductive and usually provably false with at least a few examples.

saltcured• 2 years ago

Aren't there Ryzen models as the budget offering that overlaps with i3?

graton• 2 years ago

Prebuilt PC sales is likely that cause. I'm sure AMD has a much higher share for those who are building their computers. But that is most likely an overall small share of the market of computers sold.

adrian_b4• 2 years ago

The Amazon statistics show much higher sales of AMD CPUs than of Intel CPUs, so this supports your belief about DIY computers.

jtriangle2• 2 years ago

Most computers sold are prebuilts, and most computers sold are for commercial use, ie office bees, so video game oriented PC's are a relatively small corner of the market.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

Intel sells a complete package with highly integrated laptop things such as wifi (CNVio2) and webcam (IPU6) for a very low price, and they have things that fleet buyers want like vPRO.

treprinum7• 2 years ago

The article had a separate "mobile" category for that where AMD had <20% market share.

pathless• 2 years ago

Intel has had very good marketing for decades, and they've also surrendered to marginless sales just for the sake of appearing dominant. AMD's strategy of late seems to be for higher margins, but lower share.

sweca• 2 years ago

I just bought an AMD chip for my new server build for this reason. But then I found out about the Sinkclose vulnerability...

WarOnPrivacy6• 2 years ago

Before a Sinkclose package can be deployed, it needs some multi-stage exploits to be successful. I think it's value is against exclusive targets.

I've had more than 0 clients in my career that might draw that kind of attention but not a lot more.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

Intel N100 NUCs with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSDs can be had for less than $200 on Amazon. What does AMD have in that price point?

NUCs with AMD APUs are nearly double the price. AMD is top dog in the high performing PCs but not everyone buys high performance PCs.

tracker14• 2 years ago

There aren't really any AMD options as cheap as the N100/95/97 mini-pc options. That said, there are some truly great options in the sub-$600 mini-pc segment. The Beelink SER8 with an 8845hs is pretty great to say the least. Bought one a few weeks ago for HTPC/Emulation usage running ChimeraOS, it's done a very good job. Though I might replace the BT/WiFi controller for something better supported. Only hung up once, but still annoying.

I wouldn't consider it "high performance" but it's definitely good performance and far better than any Intel mini-pc options I've looked into.

theropost• 2 years ago

This is true, though an AMD 5700U mini PC might go for $300, or less if you can find a bargain. However, it will hands down dominate a N100. 2.5 to 3x faster, not to mention the APU (vega 7) for video/gaming capabilities. I was always Intel, but AMD has really stepped up in the last few years. Their APU line up is top notch, and pretty incredible for the mini PC market (and laptops). The newer gen are great too, but for the best bargains, then Zen 3 lineup is the way to go

MostlyStable• 2 years ago

My lab is trying to purchase a new office computer with heavy enough workloads to justify a mid-to-high tier CPU. I recommended that we buy an AMD machine primarily because of the current intel issues.

The first problem I ran into is that the majority of companies selling pre-built computers do not offer an AMD option (and pre-built is a must. We are not allowed to use grant money to buy all the parts and assemble ourselves, which would have been my preferred option). And when they do, they are often limited in selection and might only be older generation or budget-tier CPUs.

I did eventually manage to find an AMD option that fit our needs and my boss forwarded to billing for approval. We got significant push back with IT recommending various intel machines that they claimed were "better" (although also several hundred dollars more expensive), but were also available through the universities preferred sales partners.

We could probably fight and get them to allow us to purchase what we want (the fact that they have to "allow" it when 100% of our funding is non-university dollars is a separate, ridiculous issue), but honestly, at this point we have probably already spent more staff time on this than the real world differences, even including the micro-code problems, are worth.

I'd bet that a lot of corporate contexts, and even home enthusiast customers, operate on the same momentum: they have always bought intel and so they will continue to buy intel. Even in the absence of some strong belief that intel is "better".

f1shy• 2 years ago

Do I remember correctly that intel was paying companies for not offering AMD? Like Dell?

vlovich1232• 2 years ago

Why not start your own company (even non profit) that offers prebuilt machines by buying the parts you want and assembling them?

renewiltord• 2 years ago

You need to go to an integrator and get an Epyc-based machine. You can do $7k ish per.

etempleton2• 2 years ago

I think there is a lot of trust of Intel. It is the only processor company most people know.

For IT departments I think a lot of it is that they want you to have processors they know work with their software stack. In addition, Intel has their own software stack that works with their processors that include features such as Remote Desktop and security. Intel, like Microsoft, has become very good at catering to the Corporate IT crowd.

pdimitar4• 2 years ago

pre-built is a must. We are not allowed to use grant money to buy all the parts and assemble ourselves, which would have been my preferred option

Huh. Why? This seems arbitrary.

acchow2• 2 years ago

the majority of companies selling pre-built computers do not offer an AMD option

Don’t you just need to find 3-4 sellers to do a shopping comparison? Don’t need anything close to the “majority”

diabllicseagull• 2 years ago

I've had a similar experience a few years ago. At the time, enthusiast Ryzen CPUs had just started outperforming Xeons that Dell and others were exclusively pushing. A sub thousand box edging out a ten thousand dollar workstation wasn't enough to move the needle until Threadripper workstations started to show up. Even then I wasn't able to push our IT to consider AMD as a serious replacement. Maybe that's partially why we still see ten Intel options for every AMD one.

Sn0wCoder• 2 years ago

System 76 has some AMD desktop / laptop options https://system76.com/desktops

Sounds like its a no go anyway, but just in case this is not the one you already found.

dagw2• 2 years ago

It's really hard to buy pre-built high end desktop computers from big brands with the latest AMD CPUs.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

To this day, Intel is still deeply ahead in software support for AI.

MKL, OpenAPI, Intel Optimization for sklearn, for pytorch, etc (there are many more). No equivilants exist from AMD but NVIDIA has an equivalent for all of these (i.e. CuPy).

Using AMD for AI stuff only makes sense if you never believe that you may want to do any kind of ML-like workload on or with the CPUs assistance. This is true for many folks though, but for those it's not true for, they will buy blue until Intel no longer exists.

treprinum7• 2 years ago

MKL runs on Ryzens just fine and newest Ryzens all have AVX512 which all new desktop/laptop Intels lack. "AI" on CPU is a gimmick, everybody does it on GPU anyway (outside 128GB RAM M3 Max that has some LLM use, but it's still due to shared memory with GPU).

WarOnPrivacy6• 2 years ago

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

I sometimes pick Intel over AMD because I don't have AMD's CPU naming conventions memorized - and I'm in a hurry.

dukeyukey• 2 years ago

Hah, I felt that urge last time I bought a PC - I could easily roughly compared Intel performance vs price, but with AMD I had to look up half the models.

jhickok• 2 years ago

Like you don't have time to research the CPUs for a personal machine? Man I usually go overboard reading up on the hardware going into my own desktop.

Panzer044• 2 years ago

Especially in laptops, AMD has a downright insane naming scheme designed to confuse buyers - so this is honestly kind of understandable..

jtriangle2• 2 years ago

We changed our current order for workstations to AMD parts. They arrive today or tomorrow I think.

Odds are it would have been fine, they were just i3 worker bee boxes, but, it's not really worth the risk when there's a viable alternative.

mdasen2• 2 years ago

Honestly, this is one of the reasons I think Intel's stock is likely undervalued at this point (not that I want to invest my money with management I don't feel confident in).

Intel is facing a lot of threats and they rested on their laurels. At the same time, Intel is still 75-80% of the market - even as AMD started killing Intel in performance for several years. I'm less sure that Intel will hit its fab milestones than Intel's press releases, but I'm also not sure that AMD can really take advantage of that. AMD is reliant on TSMC's capacity and as we've seen recently, AMD often has to wait a year or two before it can use TSMC's latest processes. Even AMD's upcoming Zen 5 processors will be using TSMC's 4nm N4P process (with future Zen 5 processors expected to be 3nm). If Intel is able to get 18A out the door in 2025, Intel's fabrication will certainly be competitive with what AMD can get (and likely quite a bit better).

From what I've read (and I might be wrong), it sounds like Intel is moving to High NA EUV soon (now-ish/2025) while TSMC is waiting until around 2030 (https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...). Is TSMC falling into the trap of letting a competitor out-invest them - the same trap that Intel fell into ~2012-2022? Probably not, but it does seem likely that the advantage TSMC had will taper away over the next couple years - assuming Intel isn't full of crap about their progress.

Even if TSMC maintains a lead against Intel, can AMD take marketshare? Specifically, can AMD produce as many chips as demanded or are they somewhat limited by how much capacity they can get from TSMC? For example, if people want X number of AMD server chips, does AMD manufacture 25% of that number and 75% of customers buy Intel chips because that's what is available due to AMD's lack of fab capacity? I'm not saying that is the case - it's a genuine question for someone that knows more about the industry than I do.

We do know that TSMC has limited capacity. Apple tied up TSMC's 3nm capacity such Apple is the only company shipping 3nm parts. It looks like Intel will be the next company shipping 3nm parts with their Lunar Lake using TSMC's N3B process this fall.

I'd also note that Intel's fabs aren't unlimited either. Meteor Lake moved to Intel 4 in December 2023, but Emerald Rapids (server) remained on Intel 7 at the same time. Intel can't just churn out as many Intel 4 chips as they'd like.

I too wonder how/why AMD is still below 25% marketshare given Intel's issues. I wonder if AMD has limitations on how much fab capacity it can get which is stifling attempts at gaining marketshare. At the same time, it looks like Intel is on a course to fix its issues - if one can believe what Intel is saying. If Intel is able to ship 18A chips in 2025 at volume, it seems like it should fix the big issue that Intel has been facing - inferior fabs. AMD has been able to out-do Intel in part because it's been able to rely on TSMC's better fabrication. Is this just a blip where Intel looks bad 2020-2024? That's a genuine question because I don't really know enough about the industry. Maybe someone will say that Intel's PR is mostly bluster and that they're still being run by beancounters trying to optimize for short-term profits. Maybe someone will say that Intel is investing in the right direction, but there's still a lot of risk around pulling off High NA EUV for 2025. Maybe someone will say that Intel is likely to hit their milestones and will regain the title of best-fab.

However, given that AMD hasn't been able to really hammer Intel's marketshare, it feels like Intel has more staying power than I'd think. Again, like the parent comment, it's always puzzled me that AMD hasn't gained a ton of marketshare over the past 5 years.

treprinum7• 2 years ago

All these points about Intel are just waiting for an answer to "Is Intel capable of changing its prevailing culture or not?". There is a reason why Intel fell behind and it wasn't due to a lack of engineering geniuses inside. You might bet on the stock market and see. AMD obviously has a SPOF in TSMC and its limited capacity.

high_na_euv• 2 years ago

Aint high na euv for 14A?

qwytw• 2 years ago

Isn't Meteor Lake made by TSMC (at least some parts like the GPU)? Which would explain the capacity constraints.

bangaladore• 2 years ago

My next CPU will be AMD. Why I'm not upgrading yet:

1. I generally use the same CPU for 2-3 years. I have a 11700k right now.

2. AMD hasn't released the beefier versions of its new CPU. High-end consumer Intel chips have many more cores/threads (P + E), while AMD's top right now has 16 threads.

#2 Is why I'm holding off for now. I'm waiting for the X3D version of their chip with ~2x the core count and more threads.

BeefWellington• 2 years ago

#2 is just incorrect, the top end ThreadRipper (7995WX) has 96 Cores / 192 Threads.

Intel has nothing that comes close to it.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

Depending on you definition of recent, because it's to recent to really make any significant impact.

If you're thinking recent as in the last few years, then because the performance and power issues with Intel aren't large enough to make any difference for regular desktop use. Most will be on a 3 - 5 year upgrade cycle, so your new office PC just needs to be better than a five year old one, which it will be.

What it might do it damage the used market. Prices on Intel based refurbished PCs needs to drop, by a lot, now that we know that many/most of those CPUs are damaged beyond repair and will continue to degrade.

xboxnolifes• 2 years ago

Because, like you said, the issues are recent.

deelowe• 2 years ago

Because AMD's general purpose offerings are pretty poor in comparison to intel (e.g. per per watt, productivity, etc). AMD only really shines in high end applications like gaming or high core count cloud computing.

JasonSage• 2 years ago

I think it's going to change a lot in coming years, but it's early days.

I feel like the writing has been on the wall for Intel's downward trajectory and AMD's substantial improvements for a few years now, but I think a lot of trust and brand loyalty has papered over the signs for Intel enthusiasts.

On a hardware news site covering the recent news, I saw for the first time in Intel buyers... shock. Incredulity. Disappointment. It's the first time I've seen self-admitting Intel fans come out in numbers questioning their beliefs and perceptions.

I think in the next 4-year cycle as home PC builds turn over and Intel buyers are coming back to market, there's going to be a large influx of AMD converts. The Intel disaster lately will have turned erosion into an exodus. Maybe not a monumental one. But the AMD numbers are going to grow seriously over the next half decade.

nickdothutton• 2 years 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.

wmf2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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...

reginald78• 2 years ago

IIRC Intel never wanted to license x86. IBM required it so they'd have a second supplier. And Intel has been trying to correct that ever since.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

What saved Intel? The Pentium-3.

The Pentium-pro which become the Pentium-2, then Pentium-3 then... Of course each change in name come with some interesting new features, but the Pentium-pro was where that linage started.

lvl155• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

kens• 2 years 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• 2 years 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."

Sammi2• 2 years 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.

hakfoo2• 2 years ago

I'm curious how they count a server/data-centre CPU.

The Xeon range covers servers, to HEDT, to basically "desktop workstation that requires ECC" levels of functionality and pricing.

For AMD those are three separate ranges, so I'm curious if they can effectively differentiate between a Ryzen bought for a desktop and one going in a server rack.

Sammi2• 2 years ago

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

GeekyBear• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

marcosdumay3• 2 years 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.)

Panzer044• 2 years 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.

Deukhoofd• 2 years ago

The path forward appears to be radical ISA switches or something besides yet another x86 node shrink

What I'm worried about is that the path they'll choose is the Apple route, and begin releasing SoCs, hurting repairability and upgradability.

Narhem• 2 years ago

Intels market share is pretty close to a monopoly.

more_corn• 2 years ago

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

AMD records its highest server market share in decades

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