Smartphones certainly transformed the chip business and SoCs past the PC in volume and compute density on the client side. I think AI workloads are forcing compute speed and density to evolve much faster in the server space (and maybe on the client side as well for inference) than would have happened with organic evolution based on traditional workloads.
AMD to Buy ZT Systems in $4.9 Billion Challenge to Nvidia
- Thread starter Daniel Nenni
- Start date
Thought this was a great explanation of AMD's strategy:
What AMD is going to do is up its game in systems architecture and engineering. At the moment, AMD has somewhere around 500 system engineers, Norrod estimates, but ZT Systems has 1,100 people that do this work. And given that AMD doesn’t just build systems to one standard, but multiple standards, it needs that many more people to help it design and build to test – but not manufacture for production – the future GPU accelerated systems that are going to be a challenge for it. It is not clear what AMD will get as it spins off that ZT Systems manufacturing business, but amassing 1,100 system engineers with deep, real-world experience would not only cost billions and billions of dollars, but it may not be possible to get it any other way than acquiring a boutique high performance system manufacturer like ZT Systems.
www.nextplatform.com
ps: I think the article get's it wrong on NVIDIA. I don't think NVIDIA does any actual in-house manufacturing of their new servers, but they work closely with contract manufacturers to design, test and produce.
What AMD is going to do is up its game in systems architecture and engineering. At the moment, AMD has somewhere around 500 system engineers, Norrod estimates, but ZT Systems has 1,100 people that do this work. And given that AMD doesn’t just build systems to one standard, but multiple standards, it needs that many more people to help it design and build to test – but not manufacture for production – the future GPU accelerated systems that are going to be a challenge for it. It is not clear what AMD will get as it spins off that ZT Systems manufacturing business, but amassing 1,100 system engineers with deep, real-world experience would not only cost billions and billions of dollars, but it may not be possible to get it any other way than acquiring a boutique high performance system manufacturer like ZT Systems.
Why AMD Spent $4.9 Billion To Buy ZT Systems
If AMD is willing and eager to spend $4.9 billion to buy a systems company – that is more than its entire expected haul for sales of datacenter GPUs for
www.nextplatform.com
ps: I think the article get's it wrong on NVIDIA. I don't think NVIDIA does any actual in-house manufacturing of their new servers, but they work closely with contract manufacturers to design, test and produce.