Report: AMD Server Chip Market Share to Grow 10x From Pre-Epyc Era

According to DigiTimes, AMD has won significant orders from major enterprise data center players, including Dell, IBM and Nokia. AMD is now expected to represent 10% market share by the end of 2020, which would be roughly 10-fold more than before Epyc. 

AMD recently announced the second-generation Epyc processors with pricing ranging from $500 for a variant with 8 cores and 16 threads to $6,950 for a 64-core and 128-thread variant. AMD’s server chips promise significantly lower price per core than Intel, while offering relatively similar performance per core. 

Earlier this month, AMD announced that Dell EMC would be building five new server designs using the second-generation 7nm Epyc processors. The chipmaker’s recent list of customers also includes ATOS, IBM Cloud, HPE, Nokia, OHVcloud, TSMC and Supermicro. 

All of these customers intend to use the Epyc processors for enterprise, cloud, or high-performance applications. AMD’s new Epyc platform recently claimed a number of world records when benchmarking certain cloud and enterprise applications.

Now it seems like many big data center players are ready to deal with AMD once again. Most of these players previously took a multi-year break from AMD. During that time, AMD got stuck with its older Bulldozer chip architecture, which wasn’t even close to competing with Intel in single-thread performance. 

AMD may have never dominated the server chip market, but the company was just about wiped out from this market when Intel was boasting 99% server chip market share, until less than two years ago. Intel now hopes it will prevent AMD from surpassing 20% market share, but with all of the company's recent shortages and issues with its processing node, only time will tell if it will be able to do that.