AMD Surpasses Intel in Data Center Chip Sales

In a significant shift within the tech industry, AMD has successfully surpassed Intel in revenue generated from datacenter chips, marking the end of Intel’s long-standing dominance in this critical sector.

Historically, Intel has been the leading player in the server and datacenter market, maintaining a stronghold even as AMD continued to gain traction in the laptop and desktop segments. Recent reports from analyst Sravan Kundojjala indicate that this has finally changed, with AMD taking the lead in datacenter revenue.

For the first time, AMD overtook Intel in datacenter revenue during the third quarter of 2024. However, it is important to note that their revenue scale is still relatively small, being less than the revenue generated by NVIDIA from networking alone.

Sravan Kundojjala has pointed out that while NVIDIA has surpassed both companies, AMD’s achievement is remarkable given the long-standing status of Intel in the market. The decline in Intel’s revenue in this sector is concerning and highlights the challenges that the company is currently facing.

AMD has been successful in winning over high-profile clients from Intel. One major client is Google Cloud, which chose AMD's EPYC processors to power its Tau Virtual Machines (VMs) back in mid-2021. This decision was driven by the desire for better performance and energy efficiency.

“At Google Cloud, our customers’ compute needs are evolving,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “By collaborating with AMD, Google Cloud customers can now leverage amazing performance for scale-out applications, with great price-performance, all without compromising x86 compatibility.”

In late 2021, Meta and Cloudflare also made similar moves towards AMD’s technology. Cloudflare, for example, discovered that while Intel's processors matched AMD's in performance, they consumed several hundred more watts of power per server. This significant difference made Intel’s performance per watt far less attractive.

The progress made by AMD is evident, as the company has managed to overturn a market situation that was once thought to be impenetrable. Their advancements in technology and focus on performance and efficiency have now placed them at the forefront of the datacenter market.

AMD, Intel, DataCenter