When AMD announced the launch of its Ryzen desktop PC chips earlier this month, it was met with elation by PC hardware enthusiasts. The pent-up demand was signicant. For years, Intel sold the only competitive high-end processors on the PC market. AMD promised processing power that was competitive with (and sometimes better than) Intel chips, and at a fraction of the cost of Intel.
Now, AMD is hoping to find a similarly receptive market in the data center, where Intel has an even greater hold of the market -- around 95% of the world's servers are powered by Intel.
On Tuesday, AMD released some initial benchmark results for its upcoming data center chip, called Naples. The Naples chip is based on the company's latest processing architecture, Zen, the same used in the Ryzen PC chips.
AMD pitted servers equipped with Naples and an Intel Xeon server chip (specifically E5-2699A V4) against each other. Doing a seismic analysis across a billion point grid, AMD found its chip was two and a half times faster completing the task than Intel. And quadrupling the data analysis to a four billion point grid, Intel's Xeon processor didn't even have enough memory to load the results, while AMD finished the task in 54 seconds
AMD also said its hardware just has more technical advances to offer than anything Intel is doing: mostly, 32 processing cores, compared to Intel's main Xeon chip that has up to 24 cores.
"We take all competition seriously, but we have to wait and see if the claims match the realities, especially with real-world applications," Intel said in a statement. "With world record performance on Xeon that has been shipping for over a year and our next generation product, Skylake, also in the market today, we’re confident that our products will maintain their performance leadership."
In a recent presentation, Forrest Norrod, a senior vice president and general manager at AMD, called the data center market "innovation starved" and suffering from "incrementalism."
"We have seen incredible innovation in software over the last 10 or 15 years," Norrod said. "That innovation hasn't run down to the server. ... The fundamental architecture of the server is about the same as it was for the last 10 years. There's been a few improvements, but it hasn't fundamentally changed."
"We think Naples will bring a new day for the data center," Norrod continued. "It will help bring innovation back to the data center and address problems that a lack of innovation has posed to our industry."
Although AMD isn't talking about how its server chip will be priced, Norrod promises some good competition with Intel. "I think Intel is closing in on $8,000 and I will not launch a $8,000 chip," he said in an interview. "That's just ridiculous."
AMD is planning to deliver the Naples server chip in the second quarter of 2017.
The data center has been a profitable stronghold for Intel for years. Intel's Xeon chips have gotten pricey with the lack of competition, and it provides Intel with delicious profit margins. But the business "is beginning to crack," wrote Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, in a recent note. "The world seems to be moving against Intel's strengths, as the importance of design and architectural expertise grows while Moore's Law slows; while Intel continues to double down on process but experiences delays, competitors (through a stronger focus on design and architecture) are developing competitive (and more efficient) products."
AMD used to be a strong competitor in the data center against Intel, until a series of missteps let Intel overtake nearly the entire market. In 2013, AMD even attempted to shift its focus to ARM-based processors (as opposed to x86-based architecture), but nothing got off the ground.
For the first time in many years, AMD could pose a real threat to Intel's server supremacy. It will still take many years for companies to switch over their data center hardware, but it's looking more likely than ever. Norrod said: "The market demands competition."
Updated with comment from Intel.
