Kathy Gibson is with AMD in Sandton – AMD and its partners are tackling the potential of the data centre market, with innovations in the 7nm technology helping to drive this.
Sukh Dhillon, EMEA commercial channel director at AMD, tells partners that the market opportunity for AMD is huge, at $29-billion in the data centre, $30-billion in the PC market and $15-billion in immersive technology.
“AMD is an absolute technology player, and the largest companies in the world are choosing our products.”
The company aims to maintain its high-performance leadership introduced in 2016 with the Zen architecture. This year, the company introduced its Zen 2 architecture, with 7nm processors now shipping.
The reason AMD has been able to take back leadership in the processor market is its “fabless” strategy that allows it to focus on design, while leapfrogging design teams keep the innovation momentum going, Dhillon explains.
Zen 3 is on track, and will hit the market in 2020, he adds.
AMD’s market share has grown in both the client and server space, with AMD already above 13% in the client environment and aiming to reach 10% server market share.
Decision-makers are confident about AMD technology, and the company aims to leverage this in increasing market share.
The AMD Ryzen Pro processors are on par with competitors on single-thread performance, and well ahead of multi-thread platforms, Dhillon says.
The platform offers image stability, processor availability, commercial-grade quality, enterprise class manageability and??
There has been tremendous momentum from vendor partners, and a number of desktop and notebook PCs are available from HP and Lenovo.
Dhillon adds that the Mictosoft relationship has been enhanced, and AMD is now found in the Surface designs.
“Change is coming and we want partners to embrace is, and innovate with their customers on the AMD message.”
In the enterprise environment, AMD recently announced all-new CPU and GPU architectures with aggressive roadmaps.
The Epyc processors are based on Zen 2 and bring a new approach to chip and system integration to market.
“This is an absolutely crucial update int eh enterprise space,” Dhillon says.
He points out that the success of Epyc in the data centre is helping to validate AMD technology across the board.
“What we have achieve in the last three months is to change the market,” Dhillon says. “We have the highest performance x86 CPU, bar none.”
As the first 7nm service CPU, Epyc’s new architecture brings a unique chiplet design with unmatched core density to market, he adds.
The total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new processors is disruptive, he says. The higher performance drives lower capex and opex to achieve up to 50% lower TCO than competitive products.
The architecture allows partners to offer customers the equivalent of two-socket performance in a single socket, Dhillon explains.
AMD backs up its technology claim with 100 world record benchmarks, validated by vendors, he adds. These benchmarks encompass a wide range of use cases.
The single socket architecture also drives savings by reducing the number of servers required as well as reduced licensing and power costs.
From a server platform perspective, AMD partners with HPE, Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cray, Microsoft, HP, Gigabyte, Tyan, Supermicros, Atos and Inventec.
On the cloud, it is validated by Google, Microsoft AWS, OVH, Hetzner, Oracle, HiVelocity and more.
With a focus on the channel, AMD drives an aggressive partner programme.
“And we have full availability of all our products now,” Dhillon adds.