re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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Intel's Data Center Group earned $5.2 billion last quarter, so losing up to 20% of those revenues could strike a severe blow to the company's bottom line. Krzanich's statements come on the back of Intel's admission during its recent earnings call that it was reducing guidance for server sales in the second half of the year, citing "tougher competition going into the second half." We've also learned that server chips from AMD's technology licensing agreement with China-based companies are coming to market soon.

Intel currently has roughly 99% of the server processor market, but AMD is quickly making inroads. AMD's EPYC processor has proven to be extremely competitive with Intel's offerings.

AMD is well on track to deliver on its roadmap, as evidenced by the company's recent presentation at Computex. Lisa Su presented a working second-gen EPYC processor, codenamed Rome, fabbed on the 7nm process. Most importantly, the new processor features the new Zen 2 microarchitecture that should bring along improved IPC and other optimizations. AMD says the processors will sample to partners in the second half of 2018, and that general availability is slated for early 2019. This second-gen processor can also drop into the same SP3 socket as the first-gen EPYC models, which makes transitioning to the new processors all the more attractive. AMD's EPYC processors also have the advantage of the x86 instruction set, so optimizing existing software stacks is a relatively minor proposition compared to switching over to ARM-based servers.

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