AMD's server marketshare hits 1% for the first time in 4 years

AMD's new Epyc server CPUs come up to 32 cores but will also be available with 48 in 2019 (Source: AMD)

Since the mid 2000s, AMD's server market share has been in a steady decline, going from owning a quarter of the entire market in 2006 to not even 1% in 2014. Recently, AMD's fortunes have begun to shift and the CPU designer is making a comeback with their new server line up Epyc. In Q2 of this year, AMD announced it had finally increased their market share in the server to more than 1%.

Matthew Connatser, Published 08/09/2018

AMD Zen

The Register reports that AMD has broken into the server market with 1% market share. While 1% is obviously not a large number by any means, the CPU server market is a multi billion dollar industry and that one percent could be worth millions in revenue for AMD, about US$60 million according to Mercury Research. Compared to last year, AMD's market share increased a massive 181% and a respectable 41% over last quarter. Although The Register is skeptical that AMD will make ~5% market share in servers by the end of 2018, AMD has said it is confident in this goal. It has happened before; AMD, almost overnight, became a serious competitor for Intel from 2004 to 2006 with their Opteron server CPUs.

This increase in market share is just the latest development in a string of successes for AMD, which recently released its Q2 earnings report. Q2 was a massive victory for the company, as AMD made US$1.76 billion in revenue, the highest in 7 years, and beat expectations by far. In the earnings call, AMD executives such as CEO Lisa Su and CFO Devinder Kumar explained how AMD launched 50 new customer Epyc products from companies such as Cisco and HP as well as developing a strong partnership with Tencent Cloud who currently offers Epyc. AMD says these gains made Epyc shipments more than double.

Su also mentioned that the Zen 2 based Rome Epyc CPU was sampling to partners. Rome will be a 48 core CPU built on the 7nm process from TSMC, making it much larger and likely more power efficient than the current Naples architecture upon which the current generation of Epyc is based on. The CEO said Rome, or the second generation of Epyc, will be a necessary step in reaching 10% share in the server market. Su went on to say AMD feels "good about our competitive position and the path to double digit market share." Regardless of what detractors say, AMD and its CEO remain very confident in the company's ability to reach 5% by the end of 2018 and then 10% sometime in 2019 with Rome. Even 10% of the market would mean vast sums of money for AMD, and a loss of revenue for Intel. Intel will undoubtedly not give up without a fight, and it will be interesting to see how Intel responds to a 48 core CPU, which would have 71% more cores and a potentially better process than Intel's current flagship CPU the Xeon 8180M. Although the 8180M is ahead of the Epyc 7601P, AMD's 32 core flagship, adding another 16 cores into the mix might be too much for the CPU giant to handle.