AMD records its highest server market share in decades

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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

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.