Can anyone give me insight into why Intel is so far ahead in this space?
I'm just speculating here, but it feels to me like they're just not accurately measuring the market share for servers.
(in any case I cannot run it - needs the ncurses v5 shared library, I have already v6 installed on my AMD server)
I think this excludes huge population of servers as we know Windows is not dominant there.
Edit: Because people seem to think that the numbers are made up, here's some more sources with not quite as high, but similarly dominant numbers:
Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-... - microsoft @ 49% in 2017
t4: https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-sh... - microsoft @ 47% in 2018
Windows isn't even the most used OS on Azure. Certainly large deployments at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. accounting for a huge proportion of the population aren't running Windows either.
I'm sure if you looked at "servers installed in a data centre" then it would be closer to what you expect. But there are so many servers doing "boring" jobs in cupboards youll never see it totally skews the figures.
> In 2019, the Windows operating system was used on 72.1 percent of servers worldwide, whilst the Linux operating system accounted for 13.6 percent of servers. Compared to 2018, both companies experienced an increase to their overall market share.
(And since it describes both “Windows” and “Linux” as “companies” that gained marketshare, I’m somewhat suspicious of their information gathering.)
But not being registered with them, I don’t have access to what passes for their detailed source information for that claim.
So a reasonable guess for today seems > 5 million.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers
[2] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/repo...
It'd be the easiest $10,000 I'd ever make
I don't have access to the full numbers, but I'd bet on the linux side being majority red hat for the same reason.
Look at top500, it's literally 0% windows, https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/
Many of the VPS providers don't even have windows options because the demand is so low it's not even worth offering as a product.
Server farm sysadmins I know habitually lament they are rusty in windows whenever it's in front of them because it's completely vanished from their daily experience
If this was a survey of companies where the weight of say, a liquor store with a 20 year old beater in the back closet that they'll call a server is 1 vote, and say, all of Amazon is also 1 vote, then maybe you can get that number, but that's basically the only way
you could even look at Red Hat, one of microsoft's competitors, who showed microsoft's market share at 49.6% in 2017: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-...
So the position moved 71 -> 49 -> 24
There's a difference again. Is "server" a chassis in a rack with redundant power and some RAID array or is it some standard computer that was christened as such? It's not a useful category because it allows for arbitrary segmenting to pump the numbers. Are we counting by service, machine, company? Depends what result you want.
If you're going to count windows machines (as in cases) by hand at a Noc, farm or center you won't be needing a calculator or likely a second hand.
Windows is certainly more prominent than Solaris or any commercial traditional unix but outside of desktops, which have a cleaner definition, it's been going in same direction for 20 years.
Microsoft has also been pivoting away from windows as a revenue source for a while. Video consoles, media companies, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, they don't necessarily see windows in their future and we shouldn't either
It's a very careful way to state the question to make it look like the numbers back what's clearly a wrong answer.
It puts the framing of "well I guess I'm using a sedan" and resituates the problem to solve all its shortcomings. It's a classic implicit framing propaganda technique.
Windows trends to be reserved for AD, jump hosts (much to my chagrin, I prefer SSH), virtual desktops and stuff that end-users access, because user management is where Windows is still ahead.
I suppose in small businesses they will have all the user management bits but no need for more than one or two "real" servers, so it doesn't matter if it's Windows too.
In bulk, Linux servers are much easier to manage though and since most application platforms will work just fine if not better on Linux, it's just the sensible choice unless you have something specific that requires Windows. Generally easier licensing certainly does not hurt.
The fact that on any Linux distribution you get trivial, easily-managed access to thousands of software packages free of licensing worries out-of-the-box makes for a large advantage over Windows where the concept of using a package manager and central repository seems to be a fairly new thing and you have to set everything up yourself or just deal with developers and users installing random crap from who knows where because by default there's no better option. There's also the fact that Linux server software tends not to have GUIs because servers are headless by default, which also makes them easier to manage once you run out of fingers to count them.
Plenty of open source people have offered paid support so corporate clients could expense things.
Of course it‘s easy to make up statistics to show that the OS made by some Sovjet hacker in his mother’s basement (probably using lots of stolen MS IP) is supposedly more popular than the products made in the US by a reputable firm such as Microsoft, but who is going to believe that?
If it's going to run Linux, you tick that option when ordering. Or you tick "no OS".
This may be more useful information for the server market, even if old.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-q3-2020-cpu-m...
Edit: Additionally, we only did that work on a single set of systems prior to purchase, not the systems post purchase, so 1 of N, instead of rerunning on N. It was presumed that performance would remain the same on same hardware configuration etc.
E.g. the CPU on the VPS I'm renting is from 2013, and it makes perfect sense that it is form Intel.
- Stable\known CPUs, most vendors are used to Intel.
- Infrastructure\Support, Intel has a lot more infrastructure to support customers\contracts
- Long cycles, servers are more complex to replace and contracts can span multiple years.
- Compatibility, many rely on Intel specific features or are afraid to try their solution on a different CPU vendor.
- Relationships\Market Share, Intel still is a far bigger brand with more prestige
Intel has more software engineers that AMD has employees, so their support for their math libraries, compilers, their GPU drivers, their benchmarking tools, and their contributions to the LLVM ecosystem, the Linux kernel, and other projects have helped them get an iron grip on academic/scientific side of high-performance computing.
BTW, lots of HPC are (again) going for AMD. Hopefully I don't end up getting subpoenaed twice this round! It was a little painful last time.
1) 5 year support contracts
2) OEM unavailability.
Even now getting an AMD server is a "go out of your way" situation. Add to the chip shortage and you have people holding on to hardware a bit longer or going intel for availability (those are minor reasons).
Anecdotally I just ordered 50 or so AMD servers.
In my case I had to wait ~1 month to get a server having a Ryzen 9 5950X (the AX101 here https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax ). I was willing to pre-order & wait indefinitely, other people might want a server "now".
On the other hand during the pre-Zen3 era I personally didn't feel an urge to swap from Intel to AMD (I didn't feel like there was a lot of difference of performance/price). This has changed for me with Zen3 so maybe things will change during the next months... .
- According to the text below the chart, the metric is "CPUs in use rather than CPUs purchased". Assuming servers are replaced after 5 years, and assuming unit sales have not changed massively over that period (big assumptions I know, but just hand waving here...), that would mean each quarter of sales is only 5% of the total being reported here. Now in the past quarter AMD went from 2.5% total market share to 5% total market share. That would mean that AMD had 50% market share of sales in the past quarter (assuming they were selling barely any servers 5 years ago).
- Second metric, consider core count rather than CPUs. AMD's biggest CPUs have over the past year or so had 2x the core count of Intel's (64 vs 28) and hyperscalers at least tend to buy the highest core count machines, so if comparing in terms of cores, the weighting shifts even more in AMDs favor.
Of course there are plenty of caveats here.