Advanced Micro Devices Inc., seeking to re-enter the lucrative server chip market, will gain the help of Microsoft Corp. and Baidu Inc. who have committed to using their new Epyc product in their data centers.
"This is just the beginning of the commitment. You will see a lot more of us," said CEO Lisa Su. "AMD at his best was a very strong player in the data center."Epyc, which goes on sale Tuesday, is AMD's attempt to turn around a market share that fell to less than 1 percent, ceding the entire market to Intel Corp. Registering with Data Center Operators Such as Baidu, China's largest search engine. It became more important in the decade since AMD was a serious contender for Intel. That's because those customers are growing at a much faster rate than the industry at large and buying directly to build their own computers.
AMD announced Epyc versions ranging from about $ 4,000 to $ 400 per chip in price. Server chips will be cheaper than its direct counterparts from Intel and offer more performance, according to Forrest Norrod, a vice president of the company. The company made comparisons with Intel chips currently on sale and said it believes it will maintain its leadership at some benchmarks even as the world's largest chip maker updates its product range.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Dell Technologies Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and other companies will offer servers based on Epyc and Microsoft, Red Hat Inc and VMware Inc. will ensure that their software will work on the new chips.
Microsoft, for its Azure services, aims to "be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD Epyc, and its combination of high-performance and value, to customers by the end of the year," said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Calculate .
Baidu said it plans to use AMD server chips for search, artificial intelligence and cloud applications.
"The choice is only important if we are able to get the performance we need for our workloads," said Liu Chao, senior director of the company's systems technology department, in a statement. "With AMD and its new Epyc processor, we are confident that innovation in the server market will accelerate."
Since taking over AMD in 2014, Su has been working to turn around the chip maker, which has struggled to compete with Intel through long periods of its 48-year existence. Last year, Intel returned $ 17 billion of sales from its data center unit to $ 7.5 billion in operating profit.
"We take all competitors seriously and as AMD tries to re-enter the server market segment, Intel continues to deliver more than 20 years of uninterrupted data center innovations while maintaining broad ecosystem investments," Intel said in A statement before AMD Event to present the chip on Tuesday in Austin, Texas. "With our next generation Xeon Scalable processors, we look forward to continuing to deliver the highest system and core performance compared to AMD."
The latest increase in AMD's revenue and revenue was more than a decade ago when its share of the Opteron server allowed it to get more than 20 percent of the market. Tracking models failed to arrive on time or did not deliver on performance promises, and Intel improved its products. Finally, all but launch to AMD the most lucrative area of the processor market.
AMD is trying to return to the level reached by Opteron's initial success, but warns that it will take time.
"Today we are at less than 1 percent, at our peak we were above 25 percent," Su said, adding that the company's interim target is a two-percent market share. "We are realistic in that it will take some time - in the next two years."
