AMD's Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis
by Ian Cutress on June 20, 2017 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Enterprise CPUs
- EPYC
- Whitehaven
- 1P
- 2P
AMD’s Reach and Ecosystem
As mentioned at the top of the piece, the big launch for AMD this year is the server platform. EPYC has an opportunity to reinvigorate AMD’s bottom line to the tune of several billion dollars a year, if they can get traction in the market. Depending on which Analyst you speak to, some are predicting anywhere from a 5% to a 25% gain in market share for AMD, into a ~$25B total addressable market. Given AMD’s worth, that would mean that the balance sheet in a few years might look as if 80% of it is provided by the server team.
As part of the launch today, AMD is announcing partners working with them to optimize the platform for various workloads. Sources say that this includes all the major cloud providers, as well as all the major OEMs. We saw several demo systems at the launch event with partners as well, such as HPE and Dell.
The variety of internal systems used by AMD for the demonstrations (some Dell/HP logos)
Using 8 VMs to compile the Linux Kernel in one go on AMD vs Intel 2P systems
Of course, the big question is if AMD is actually getting in significant orders for processors. Nothing is public on that yet, and we are told that they are likely to be nearer the end of the year. We are eagerly waiting to test the processors when our review systems arrive, and we will provide our performance breakdown soon.
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davegraham - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
I'm waiting to see consumer sites benchmark a server CPU against retail CPUs and then crow about clocks, etc. ;) it'll be done, it'll be vicious, and people will take it as the gospel truth. heck, let's just get the Cinebench testing done ASAP and call it day ;)Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
yeah why is anandtech reporting about server hardware. nobody is interested in that.just let us take AMDs numbers as gospel.... a interpolate threadripper numbers until august.
SkiBum1207 - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Excuse me? There are us who use servers to make money - we definitely care about Anandtech's analysis of enterprise hardware.davegraham - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
I am interested in Ian's take but I test this hardware on my own using the toolsets available to me. While I appreciate Johan's insights, I find most of the consumer sites (as Anandtech is one of them) to be reaching when they try to provide realistic workload testing. StorageReview.com does a decent job (mostly), but I'm finding that most reviews, sadly, are hit and miss against test benches and their applicability is...dubious at best.and like LurkingSince97 infers, spec-int is a fanboy benchmark ;)
D
at80eighty - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
did you discover the site yesterday?davegraham - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
lol. who, me? nope. ;)at80eighty - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
sorry, the comment threading is not helpful - i directed that question to Gothmoth's absurd postdeltaFx2 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
Plenty of people are interested in it, and those people do their own benchmarking. They don't visit Anandtech or Tom's hardware to get this information.LurkingSince97 - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Except that nobody runs spec-int on their servers.AMD made two mistakes:
1. spec-int should not be used to compare servers across architectures. Instead, run real software that people use on servers. Virtualization benchmarks, JVM stuff, databases, whatever. Real world things.
2. Trying to modify spec-int results (I guess, by using GCC instead of intel's compiler, and compensating for the stuff their compiler does). Yeah, a lot of the tricks that some compilers use on spec-int are absolutely garbage and would not make real-world applications faster -- just spec-int. But there is no objective way to disentangle that. So stay away from it.
IanHagen - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
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https://www.extremetech.com/computing/193480-intel...
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