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).
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.
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".
Please, 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]
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.
If 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.
Except 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.
So 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.
AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space
(tomshardware.com)498 points by baal80spam 5 November 2024 | 161 comments
Comments
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).
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.
Everyone I think knew AMD is catching up but thought this was still a year or two out