While Intel (INTC 0.19%) has regained its edge over AMD (AMD 2.73%) in the PC CPU market with its Raptor Lake chips, AMD is putting Intel to shame in the server chip market. Intel is still the dominant market leader, buts its products just can't hold a candle to AMD's latest EPYC processors.
Execution problems on Intel's part coupled with solid product design from AMD has created this predicament for Intel. After multiple delays, the semiconductor giant will have a chance to turn things around in a few short months.
AMD's Genoa is impressive
AMD has been steadily stealing away server CPU market share over the past few years, but its latest fourth generation EPYC Genoa chips have the potential to accelerate those gains. The chips use a 5nm manufacturing process from TSMC and a chiplet-based design from AMD, delivering substantial performance and efficiency gains.
AMD's Genoa chips feature anywhere from 16 cores to 96 cores. List prices aren't really relevant for server chips – big cloud customers buying thousands of chips at a time aren't paying list price, and total cost of ownership is more important. That makes comparisons difficult, but reviewers at Tom's Hardware concluded that Genoa has "incredible amounts of performance and a reduced TCO [total cost of ownership] that is simply unmatched by its x86 competitors."
Genoa's sheer number of cores gives it an advantage among customers who need to pack as much compute as possible into the smallest number of servers. A single server using two top-tier Genoa chips would have 192 cores and 384 threads. The best you can do on the Intel side is 40 cores per chip. Even outside the realm of workloads that heavily benefit from more cores, Tom's Hardware found that Genoa comes out on top: "Regardless of the compilation tasks we threw at the chips, the Genoa chips provided substantial speedups over the previous-gen Milan chips and beat Intel convincingly."
As it stands today, AMD is the king of the hill in the server chip market.
Sapphire Rapids is (finally) coming soon
Intel finds itself so far behind AMD in performance and total cost of ownership partly because of execution problems. The company's Sapphire Rapids server chips were originally planned for late 2021. Multiple delays have pushed back the volume launch to the first quarter of 2023.
Intel has high hopes for Sapphire Rapids. The company expects to ship 1 million units faster than it has ever done for any other line of server chips. Importantly, Intel CEO Gelsinger believes the company's execution problems are largely in the past. That's critical, because regaining its edge against AMD will take multiple generations of best-in-class products.
Intel's roadmap is aggressive, but it has to be to regain its performance advantage. Despite the Sapphire Rapids delays, Intel still expects to launch Emerald Rapids chips sometime during 2023. In 2024, Intel will roll out Granite Rapids chips as well as Sierra Forest, its first server chips to feature a mix of high-performance and high-efficiency cores. While it's taken an eternity to bring Sapphire Rapids to market, Intel is full steam ahead on launching two new generations of powerful server chips and a new line of ultra-efficient server chips over the next two years.
If Intel can pull it off, its comeback could look a lot like its comeback in the PC CPU market. Sapphire Rapids needs to be good enough to slow down market share losses to AMD, and its next-gen chips need to surpass AMD in every measure. That will be easier said than done, but with Intel more focused on execution and efficiency under Gelsinger, it would be foolish to count the company out.
