Comment by galeos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galeos | Hacker News Reader

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This obviously puts more wind in AMD's sails. That said, Intel's Datacenter growth is very impressive.

I have been an AMD investor since pre-Zen launch and I think it is fair to say that EPYC sales feel like they haven't reached the levels some have hoped for quite yet. If AMD continue to widen the gap between EPYC and Xeon, I suspect we may look back on this inertia as a bit of a 'roadrunner effect' and in a year or two's time get a shocking quarter where AMD suddenly starts taking surprisingly large bites out of Intel's datacenter market share.

Also on the GPU side of things, it is rumored that Nvidia has struggled to get capacity at TSMC and is having to use Samsung's, supposedly inferior, 8nm process for its forthcoming Ampere cards, at least until their 7nm capacity comes online at TSMC. Not sure how much truth there is to this, but highlights the capacity issues that may currently be in play.

>I have been an AMD investor since pre-Zen launch and I think it is fair to say that EPYC sales feel like they haven't reached the levels some have hoped for quite yet.

I've been looking just these last few weeks at buying a new Epyc Rome system, and one thing I was a bit surprised (though I shouldn't have been, I just haven't thought about it in a long time) about was that while Rome is incredible as a CPU the whole ecosystem around it has lagged by quite a bit. Specifically, the motherboard selection is still well behind what you can find for Xeon. That's not AMD's fault and there is a bit of a standard egg/chicken bootstrap issue, the market has to be deep enough to really start to fill out the niches. Epyc being so good is what has allowed them to start clawing their way up at all, and the MB scene is already massively better then even the start of this year. Still though it's made it harder for me at least to unthinkingly pull the trigger, every option for my intended use-case entails compromises. There is no perfect fit.

I suspect over the next 6-12 months even that will be less and less the case. And hopefully that will mean accelerating momentum for AMD and bring some more long term competitiveness to that market. But it's been interesting being on the purchase hunt and seeing the development in real time, it already feels like the whole game has changed for CPUs but of course everything supporting that lags a cycle or two.

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