AMD Epyc CPU picks up marketshare from Intel Xeon

Epyc is a new AMD CPU targeted at the datacenter market, after struggling for a number of years, AMD - the only notable semiconductor company other than Intel producing x86 CPUs – does seem to be returning to form. So far its Ryzen desktop CPUs are a hit with gamers, with two models now ranking among the top ten on Amazon.

Compared to Intel’s Xeon processors, AMD claims that Epyc offers not only significant performance improvements but also lower total cost of ownership. After peaking at 25% of the x86 server CPU market at its peak more than ten years ago, AMD has dropped back to almost zero share. If Epyc were to reclaim even a silver of the $14 billion market, it would do wonders for AMD’s $4.5-5 billion in revenues this year and next.

Epyc system provide the same 170 GB/sec of bandwidth. As the slide above suggests, AMD thinks there is plenty of bandwidth between the chiplets and across the sockets; what we want to know is what the relative latencies are between the chiplets on the die and across those two sockets. The new chipset also allows new Secure Memory Encryption feature allows for memory to be partitioned and the segments to have their data encrypted in a way that does not impact application performance because the AES-256 cryptography is done in hardware, right on the memory controllers.

AMD’s Epyc processor packs four chips onto one package, giving AMD an edge over Intel, which focuses on a large single chip. As they face the upper limit of chip manufacturing, AMD, Intel, and others will have little choice but to incorporate more MCM designs into future roadmaps.