More bad news for Intel: AMD is making rapid progress in a key market
>
The latest projections from Mercury Research show that AMD is set to continue its hot streak in the server processor market, further eroding Intel’s lead.
The company’s analysis suggests AMD increased its server CPU market share to 13.9% this quarter, marking a 13th consecutive period of growth.
According to our sister site Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab), the latest quarterly gain is potentially the largest on record for AMD, suggesting the momentum behind the company’s line of EYPC chips is only growing.
Intel hits hard times
Although the return of Pat Gelsinger to the role of CEO last year appeared to breathe new life into Intel, the company is suffering through a period of turbulence of late.
In July, Intel published a dismal quarterly earnings report, the lowlight of which was a 22% drop in revenue year-on-year. So bad was the performance, Gelsinger took to Twitter to issue a public apology.
“This quarter’s results were below the standards we have set for the company and our shareholders. We must and will do better,” he wrote.
The server CPU market has traditionally been a stronghold for Intel, whose Xeon chips have dominated practically all sub-sectors, from cloud to HPC. However, the rollout of Team Blue’s next-generation processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, has been punctuated by delays. Originally scheduled to launch in 2021, the new server chips are now expected to come to market some time in Q1 2023.
AMD, meanwhile, has gone from strength to strength with its high core-count EPYC CPUs, eating into Intel’s lead significantly.
The imminent entrance into the market of Nvidia, as well as the rise of Arm-based chips built by hyperscalers like AWS, will only ratchet up the level of competition among vendors – and the pressure on Intel.
In a Q&A with TechRadar Pro last month, AMD’s head of EMEA sales, Roger Benson, outlined the company’s strategy for seizing an even larger slice of the pie in the months and years ahead.
“Having successfully established AMD EPYC in HPC and cloud, we are now accelerating in mainstream enterprise IT and telecommunications,” he said.
“In enterprise, we have seen customers embrace AMD EPYC servers for software defined storage and virtualization, and now we see customers increasingly using our products in database and analytics solutions. And in telco, customers are certifying AMD EPYC servers for core network solutions, and going forward in the 5G era, we expect edge server solutions will come as well.”
“We are working with customers to provide the right compute engine for the right workload in their data centers. AMD’s 4th generation EPYC processors will continue this path for our next generation.”