Great interview with a server engineer with 20 years experience
- Biz application lifetime is about 25 years!! servers still run applications go back to windows 2000. These will not work in AMD at all.
- Server engineers overall have moved to 3 year cycle compared to 7 year cycle earlier in their agreement with Intel. Ideally server engineers want to move immediately. Lesser cycle gives them better choices.
- Current EPYC CPUs are being validated. Server folks validate new component before bringing it online. But covid has pushed that out.
- Older applications may not move to AMD.
- The cost of switching is huge - unless AMD can give 4x perf do not expect any switching from intel to AMD. The cost is the down time in servers. 10% 20% better perf is not enough.
- Risk is premium - Money is not the problem. The cost is the down time. In healthcare, a down server can cause death.
- Older applications will not be switched to AMD
- AMD cannot go above 50% - Intel is well entrenched and whatever applications current work with intel based servers
- Enterprise servers - At current application counts - Even if Intel kept selling the same thing for 10 years AMD cannot go above 50% market share!! Steady perf is premium. No one is going to move applications to a new platform now- supply chain + stability + security is important.
- Most AMD can do is 35%!!
- If AMD has to go above 50% - they have to rely on amazon/microsoft etc. That too even 10 years is optimistic. Not to mention need for new applications in enterprise market to bring this change. Even for ARM. All things same - 30-40 years.
- When he was running the show in a healthcare server - Moving from intel 32 bit xeon to 64 bit xeon took them 8 years.
- Intel security issues caused the move to zen3 but delayed due to covid. Otherwise, they would have waited for things to settle down. May be zen 6 in 2024!!
- AMD is very competitive in 2020 than before with their support + new hardware etc.
- Now that cycles are 3 years - Cost of purchase starts to matter now compared to Total Cost of Operations
- Enterprise buy Intel because they have to - Old applications. Just keep things running. 14nm works too. But the margins keep reducing for intel.
GPU - NVDA CUDA has 10 year head start - Very difficult to switch to AMD - Platform is sticky.
- Radeons have a shot in supercomputing space.
- One thing going for AMD is openness. In general the industry prefers open standards compliant stack. NVDA tries to tie users to its stack + applications - A problem with NVDA GPU software. AMD is open friendly.
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Much more. I am next going to see how much money does 35% mean.