this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Server side from almost non-existence to close to 25% in about 5 years is actually very impressive, given the specific market tends to be rather conservative and has a lot of inertia to steer for your favor.
The server market is the fattest segment, Intel needs to get its $hit together, this is very alarming.
When you look at the best offerings of the two companies, AMD is offering their 96 core 3d v cache EPYC at almost a third less price than Intel's 56 core sapphire rapids, and everything starts to make sense
Then you realize few customers actually buy either of those. Most sales are in the ~30ish core products. And it starts to make sense why AMD doesn't just capture the entire market but is still sitting at 25% even though the 96 core chip is so great.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that we don't buy CPUs in datacenter - we buy full servers from 3rd party suppliers. Look at a company such as CDW.
Most server customers aren't massive hyperscalers that need to maximize computer per rack-U. Xeon servers are plentiful, can be found for cheaper than their CPU MSRP's would suggest, and if we're looking for a 16 - 24 core model to spin up a branch office, a lot of times we don't even really care whether it's SPR or Epyc. There're other factors like "Is my LOB app certified by the vendor to run on Epyc"? etc.
A lot of times, when I need to order, a lot of the Epyc servers may be on backorder, or may be comparable pricing, or maybe I specifically need Xeon because I already have a Xeon Hyper-V server and want this server to be able to work in the event of a failover (best to keep your VMs on the same platform).
Hell, in Windows Server, Epyc only got support for nested virtualization with Server 2022, so it wasn't even a consideration when we did a big refresh a few years back.