[HN Gopher] AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space
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AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space
Author : baal80spam
Score : 199 points
Date : 2024-11-05 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Interpretation 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".
| rini17 wrote:
| Still, there were always clearly defined product lines, like
| Athlon vs. Opteron.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Damn, 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 wrote:
| Not 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > 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?
| rafaelmn wrote:
| His work now boils down to prepping Intel for an acquisition.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| By 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?
| saywhanow wrote:
| IIRC Intel and AMD have a patent sharing agreement that
| dissolves if either is purchased.
| cheema33 wrote:
| Intel 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 wrote:
| The only ugly (for Intel) detail being that they are fabbed
| by TSMC
| hollandheese wrote:
| Snapdragon X Plus/Elite is still faster and has better
| battery life. Lunar Lake does have a better GPU and of course
| better compatibility.
| hajile wrote:
| X 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They didn't miss out. They owned the most desirable mobile
| platform in StrongARM and cast it aside. They are the footgun
| masters.
| hajile wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Maybe I'm just spitting out random BS, but if I understood
| Keller correctly when he spoke about Zen that (for it) it's
| not really a problem to change frontend ISA as large chunk
| of work is on the backend anyways. If that's the case in
| general with modern processors, would be cool to see a
| hybrid that can be switched from x86_64 to RISC-V and, to
| add even more avangarde to it, associate a core or few of
| FPGA on the same die. Intel, get on it!
| vel0city wrote:
| There were consumer devices with a processor designed to
| be flexible on its instruction set presented to the user.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe
|
| https://youtu.be/xtuKqd-LWog?t=332
| Keyframe wrote:
| aka the company where Linus worked!
| formerly_proven wrote:
| "not really a problem to change" in the context and scope
| of a multi-billion dollar project employing thousands of
| people full time.
| bloody-crow wrote:
| Surprising it took so long given how dominant the EPYC CPUs were
| for years.
| jsheard wrote:
| Nobody ever got fired for buying Intel.
| ginko wrote:
| They should be.
| acdha wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| Complicated. 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/.
| dhruvdh wrote:
| > Performance per watt was better for Intel
|
| No, not its not even close. AMD is miles ahead.
|
| This is a Phoronix review for Turin (current generation):
| https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-
| epyc-9965-9755-benchmark...
|
| You can similarly search for phoronix reviews for the Genoa,
| Bergamo, and Milan generations (the last two generations).
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You're thinking strictly about core performance per watt.
| Intel has been offering a number of accelerators and other
| features that make perf/watt look at lot better when you
| can take advantage of them.
|
| AMD is still going to win a lot of the time, but Intel is
| better than it seems.
| andyferris wrote:
| Are generic web server workloads going to use these
| features? I would assume the bulk of e.g. EC2 spent its
| time doing boring non-accelerated "stuff".
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Intel does a lot of work developing sdks to take
| advantage of its extra CPU features and works with open
| source community to integrate them so they are actually
| used.
|
| Their acceleration primitives work with many TLS
| implementations/nginx/SSH amongst many others.
|
| Possibly AMD is doing similar but I'm not aware.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Performance per Watt was lost by Intel with the introduction
| of the original Epyc in 2017. AMD overtook in outright
| performance with Zen 2 in 2019 and hasn't looked back.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Care to post any proof?
| parl_match wrote:
| idk go look at the xeon versus amd equivalent benchmarks.
| theyve been converging although amd's datacenter offerings
| were always a little behind their consumer
|
| this is one of those things where there's a lot of money on
| the line, and people are willing to do the math.
|
| the fact that it took this long should tell you everything
| you need to know about the reality of the situation
| ksec wrote:
| Intel did an amazing job at holding on to what they had. From
| Enterprise Sales connection which AMD had very little from 2017
| to 2020. And then bundling other items, essentially discount
| without lowering price, and finally some heavy discount.
|
| On the other hand AMD has been very conservative with their
| EPYC sales and forecast.
| topspin wrote:
| I don't agree that this is surprising. To be "dominant" in this
| space means more than raw performance or value. One must also
| dominate the details. It has taken AMD a long time to iron out
| a large number of these details, including drivers, firmware,
| chipsets and other matters, to reach real parity with Intel.
|
| The good news is that AMD has, finally, mostly achieved that,
| and in some ways they are now superior. But that has taken
| time: far longer than it took AMD to beat Intel at benchmarks.
| j_walter wrote:
| Server 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.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'd still like a decent first fpga. Guys? I'm still here guys!
| Please make me some FPGAs!
| jsheard wrote:
| Sorry, 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 wrote:
| The new COP FPGAs are in the $100-400 range. Not cheap but
| nothing compared to the high end parts.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| So Intel has abandoned the sub-100usd segment to
| AMD/Xilinx, Lattice, Efinix and Microchip?
| bgnn wrote:
| Luckily they are spinning off the FPGA business to be
| Altera again
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Nah, the hobby strat is to buy a chunk o' circuit board and
| learn BGA soldering. "Chip Recovery," they call it.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/235469964291
|
| Best start believin' in the crazy cyberpunk stories. You're
| in one!
| jsheard wrote:
| Virtex UltraScales require Vivado EE so you'd still need
| the $3000 license to do anything with it :(
|
| edit: legally that is, assuming there's even enough demand
| for these tools for people to bother cracking them
| immibis wrote:
| (legally)
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| This is sofware written by hardware guys. Cracking it is
| the easy part.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Oh 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).
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