Moor Insights and Strategy principal analyst Patrick Moorhead, says that the channel will be the winner from AMD’s push into the PC and server chip markets.
Moorhead said that the move will give channel partners more options for meeting growing OEM and customer demand for silicon supplier alternatives to Chipzilla. System makers and businesses have been wanting more choice when it comes to processor vendors. The thought is that more competition will accelerate innovation and drive down prices.
AMD’s upcoming chips should give them options in important segments of the PC and servers spaces, which will be a boon for partners, Moorhead said.
“AMD-powered PCs and servers bring more choice to the channel and, in some circumstances, differentiation for the channels who assort it. Ryzen Threadripper [for PCs] and EPYC [for servers] are unique in very highly threaded environments and EPYC in single-socket systems.”
Intel has long been the dominant player in both PCs and servers, with market shares of 90 percent.
ARM and IBM through its OpenPower efforts are also making a push for a greater presence in the server space, although this is of limited impact.
An AMD meeting with financial analysts unveiled more details about the company’s upcoming Threadripper and EPYC processors – as well as next-generation Vega Frontier GPUs for workstations – giving the industry greater hope for more competition in the chip market and a boost to the somewhat stagnant PC and server markets.
Threadripper is a high-end PC chip with 16 cores and 32 threads and scheduled for release this summer.
Meanwhile AMD is bring in Ryzen processors aimed at systems like 2-in-1s and gaming desktops, as well as low-end systems, which are due out later in the year and are based on the Zen microarchitecture.
AMD has also announced EPYC, codenamed “Naples” and based on Zen and that will offer up to 32 cores and 64 threads with bulked-up capabilities around interconnect and memory. It could also help reduce costs for large enterprises and cloud datacenters by enabling a single-socket EPYC server to potentially replace a two-socket system powered by Intel Xeons.
We are expecting to see more details at the Computex 2017 show next week in Taiwan.
Moorhead was confident Threadripper will do well in both OEMs and the channel.
“AMD announced that the Ryzen desktop [chip] would be in the top five desktop OEMs by the end of June, and I have seen models already from Lenovo, Acer and Asus. EPYC is newer, and I’m interested in seeing third-party testing. Intel has 99 percent share in servers, so there is a strong desire to have an alternative,” he said.
“The channel should take advantage of all the channel training AMD has available and also trial the products to get up to speed with how they work, Technical training is the fairest priority, followed by go-to-market training.”
The channel should use market development funds from both AMD and OEM, he added.
