In the meantime, efficiency story for AMD is playing out in CPU space. The following chart is from hardware unboxed (youtuber). 7950x beats 13900k in most multithreaded workloads while consuming almost half as much power.
Though the retail market is not hot and AMD is focusing on datacenter and laptops, they have given a good product overall. They are launching an armada of laptop processors next year. There is not much expectation since some OEMs in laptop markets are tightly controlled by intel and not to mention lack of demand. Folks like dell just will not put non intel in their high end laptops.
Everyone is waiting for the earnings call.
- My prediction for AMD is that with their chiplet architecture and higher effeciency (Refer point 5 for TCO), they have very likely moved fab capacity to cater to data center/cloud market. Why? Multiple news of cloud/DC not slowing down. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/12/microsoft-cloud-boss-scott-guthrie-customers-not-cutting-spending.html. Cost cutting playing right into AMD’s hands.
- People are moving to cloud aggressively (Example: FedEx).
- Chiplets – As of now, only AMD can move capacity like this. Their CPU/GPU has mix of nodes (5nm and 6nm). And when they see markets down in one sector they can move a part of the capacity in one of the nodes to another to cater to another sector where demand is present. This is unique to AMD as of now.
- Datacenter market : Remember this is what the thread is all about. Forrest Norrod mentioned in goldman sachs QnA that they are not limited by CPU supply but substrate supply and a lot of that will come online in Q1 2023 (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference (Transcript) | Seeking Alpha).
- DC CPU Competition 2023 – look at the following picture
Genoa marks a big shift in TCO that makes it sensible to replace aging servers. 2S (socket) Genoa offers 4x the general-purpose performance at significantly better TCO versus 2S Skylake/Cascade Lake SP server. Initial capital expenditures for Genoa-based servers are considerably higher due to the cost of higher costs of the CPU, DDR5, and PCIe 5.0. Despite this big cost jump, Genoa and Bergamo-based servers will pay for themselves many times over versus keeping already depreciated servers deployed.
Under this oversimplified model, upgrading to a 2-socket Genoa-based server from 4 existing 2-socket Skylake/Cascade Lake-based servers (2 CPUs vs 8 CPUs) is a net present value positive transaction. The payback period for Capex spent is roughly ~18 months. The payback period for a Rome/Milan server upgrade would still be ~4 years. The improvements are even more significant when you start considering new features related to security, CXL, and AVX512.
Waiting for earnings call… to confirm theory
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