The Appetite For Datacenter Compute is Ravenous

[hist78]

"I really like our chances with TSMC. I think they are an amazing partner and an amazing execution machine, and we’re going to keep using their most advanced process for each generation. I like our chances of staying at the bleeding edge of process with that.

And likewise, on the design side, we are not slowing down one little bit. We are running as fast as we possibly can. You are going to continue to see design innovation and packaging and assembly innovation from us across all product lines. I can’t control what an Intel does. I just have to assume they are going to wake up tomorrow with badass boots and a vorpal sword and fight. I have to assume that Intel is going to always bring their best from this day forward."

"Forrest Norrod: Now, when Intel was using monolithic dies, that was not at all true. Yielding the 64-core “Emerald Rapids” or the 60-core “Sapphire Rapids” or heaven forbid the 40-core “Ice Lake” was like finding hen’s teeth. And so the volume bin for Intel was several clicks down. But for us for a long time, the vast majority of our volume, certainly in the cloud, has been the top bin part.

And on the enterprise side, we do see people starting to move this way, particularly with the urgency to free up space and power for AI, we do see much more attention on consolidation.

The other thing that’s happened is VMware’s new pricing strategy, which has been greeted by the market with a number of different reactions. VMware pricing has now shifted entirely to a per-core license, so there’s no longer an incentive to buy a lower end part. Companies used to have to buy one license for up to 32 cores, and then you buy another one, if you go from 33 to 64 cores, and so on. If VMware is just charging purely by core, it’s cheaper to buy more cores in one server than it is to break that same number of cores over multiple servers."

The Appetite For Datacenter Compute Is Ravenous

It has been an invaluable asset for AMD as it re-engaged in the datacenter in the past decade to have Forrest Norrod as the general manager of its

www.nextplatform.com

 

[Paul2]

I want to put a very very big warning on the obsession over datacentre chips. Rental servers of all kinds are surreally oversupplied, but without market reaction yet. Idling, dark datacentres are common now around the world.

Those superexpensive datacentre chips are only a small, small, sub-1% part of the market. They cannot possibly be making enough money for the industry in comparison to how much money was sank into them.

Intel should above all be concerned with mainstream Xeon sliding in comparison to AMD's offerings, and I am not even speaking about Epyc, but rackmount AM4/5 Ryzens with ECC (which totally destroy low-end, low core count Xeons).

AMD intentionally adding ECC to a consumer CPU was a very strong move: AMD does not lose low end server market from that, because they had no presence there to begin with, ECC Ryzen does not compete with Epyc, but it hammers Intel, because low end Xeon sales were quite big.

"I really like our chances with TSMC. I think they are an amazing partner and an amazing execution machine, and we’re going to keep using their most advanced process for each generation. I like our chances of staying at the bleeding edge of process with that.

And likewise, on the design side, we are not slowing down one little bit. We are running as fast as we possibly can. You are going to continue to see design innovation and packaging and assembly innovation from us across all product lines. I can’t control what an Intel does. I just have to assume they are going to wake up tomorrow with badass boots and a vorpal sword and fight. I have to assume that Intel is going to always bring their best from this day forward."

"Forrest Norrod: Now, when Intel was using monolithic dies, that was not at all true. Yielding the 64-core “Emerald Rapids” or the 60-core “Sapphire Rapids” or heaven forbid the 40-core “Ice Lake” was like finding hen’s teeth. And so the volume bin for Intel was several clicks down. But for us for a long time, the vast majority of our volume, certainly in the cloud, has been the top bin part.

And on the enterprise side, we do see people starting to move this way, particularly with the urgency to free up space and power for AI, we do see much more attention on consolidation.

The other thing that’s happened is VMware’s new pricing strategy, which has been greeted by the market with a number of different reactions. VMware pricing has now shifted entirely to a per-core license, so there’s no longer an incentive to buy a lower end part. Companies used to have to buy one license for up to 32 cores, and then you buy another one, if you go from 33 to 64 cores, and so on. If VMware is just charging purely by core, it’s cheaper to buy more cores in one server than it is to break that same number of cores over multiple servers."

The Appetite For Datacenter Compute Is Ravenous

It has been an invaluable asset for AMD as it re-engaged in the datacenter in the past decade to have Forrest Norrod as the general manager of its

www.nextplatform.com

 

[tooLongInEDA]

I want to put a very very big warning on the obsession over datacentre chips. Rental servers of all kinds are surreally oversupplied, but without market reaction yet. Idling, dark datacentres are common now around the world.

Those superexpensive datacentre chips are only a small, small, sub-1% part of the market. They cannot possibly be making enough money for the industry in comparison to how much money was sank into them.

Intel should above all be concerned with mainstream Xeon sliding in comparison to AMD's offerings, and I am not even speaking about Epyc, but rackmount AM4/5 Ryzens with ECC (which totally destroy low-end, low core count Xeons).

AMD intentionally adding ECC to a consumer CPU was a very strong move: AMD does not lose low end server market from that, because they had no presence there to begin with, ECC Ryzen does not compete with Epyc, but it hammers Intel, because low end Xeon sales were quite big.

One of the interesting questions for me with all this super-expensive AI hardware is what happens with the inevitable depreciation and who actually picks up the tab for this ?

Advanced chips have always depreciated very rapidly as newer, better designs are created every year. This might not be happening quite as rapidly as in the past, but it's certainly still a thing. So whoever is buying these $bns of spectacularly expensive datacenter AI chips probably has a window of only a few years to generate returns.

These questions must apply equally to traditional datacentre hardware. But the unit costs there are lower and the returns rather more certain.