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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say it's a particularly small number: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

Add that to AMD's recent surge, Intel's in a world of hurt.

> Add that to AMD's recent surge, Intel's in a world of hurt.

Meh. Looking at the sales numbers of past quarters, AMD still hasn't significantly hurt Intel. They have made a lot of inroads among hobbyists and in small-store prebuilts, but the major brands still appear to be dominated by Intel.

It's a real shame that nobody seems to have made an actually good Raven Ridge laptop. The CPU is imho objectively better for laptop use than any Intel competitor, but all laptops built with it appear to have a major deficit of some kind or another.

Another mystery is lack of Epyc uptake. There are a lot of workloads where Epycs should be dominating Intel server chips when compared at the same price or power level, especially after all the recent chip vulnerabilities which are much less serious for AMD than they are for Intel, but Epyc sales are definitely lagging. Is AMD unable to make them, or are companies just wary of buying AMD?

There's a lot of interest in Epyc for certain use cases. It's just the server world moves slowly because when you're spending millions on massive amounts of hardware, and it needs to run 24/7 for years without defects, you want to make sure it works.

Cloud moves slowly because you don't want to force users to redeploy and, once racked, those boxes stay there for a good couple years. In-house ever-expanding large installs are much more agile. Look at how Google adopted POWER, to how Cray is offering ARM nodes in their supercomputers.

> It's just the server world moves slowly

THIS! I am not sure why people are expecting Epyc to take off like a rocket, it won't. Companies maintaining 24/7 hardware don't jump on new tech. I think Epyc will eventually take a good chunk of the market, but it will take a few years.

Also, if you are expanding an existing VMWare stack you can't mix CPU architecture and have HA. So unless you are building a new stack, then Epyc might not even be an option, even if the Admin might prefer Epyc.

So, I work as what is effectively a sysadmin role for a decently large deployment in a decently large company and I can say that we're buying EPYC for some stuff but not everything _yet_.

Build farms, where there's a lot of compute needed and it doesn't really matter the reliability of the systems, for instance, have EPYC. Some workstations have Threadripper (nobody has Ryzen) as time goes on, with AMD beating Intel in the middle market, we will expand from builders to VM farms, from VM farms to bare metal hosting, from bare metal hosting to underpinning entire projects.

It will take another 2 years of AMD being on top for our company to favour AMD. But I think it's possible.

> Another mystery is lack of Epyc uptake.

AMD and AWS just announced EC2 instances with Epyc processors a few minutes ago: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-b...

Edit: Now on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18392834

We're looking at moving to Epyc but waiting for Epyc2.

Currently on 2 socket Gold 6126's across the board.

>I wouldn't say it's a particularly small number:

It's not the number of sales alone that tells the story. It's also the profit margin. Apple is well known for allowing very low margins to their suppliers. It's not clear to me how much of Intel's revenue comes from Apple.

Well, Googling, I see this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/10/04/in...

Very rough math, but to the tune of $3B a year from Macs. It's not nothing, but is less than 5% of Intel's revenue.

This site says $4B: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/intel-stock-...

Intel's revenue growth per year these days is around this amount.

Don’t underestimate AMD’s ability to shoot itself in the foot.

> Don’t underestimate AMD’s ability to shoot itself in the foot.

Every single consumer-targeted Intel chip has integrated graphics capable of displaying a 4k movie on the screen/tv without so much as breaking a sweat. AMD has exactly 3 Ryzen chips with that capability, none of which fit into their "Lot's of cores!" strategy. I'm not sure that AMD understands what drives the majority of consumer purchases.

Non-technical, non-gaming consumers don't care about integrated graphics. They're fine with whatever's in the box. But for folks like me (and many others here) who build their own machines, we typically don't settle for integrated graphics. I have 2 4k monitor and I occasionally game, sure the latest and greatest Intel chips can probably do the multi-monitor setup, but I doubt you can play Call of Duty Black Ops 4 on them and expect a reasonable framerate.

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