AMD EPYC's success forced Intel to sell Xeon cheaper

The appearance on the market of server hardware of EPYC processors with Zen architecture allowed AMD to restore itself as a main competitive supplier of Intel Xeon processors. Prior to this, over the course of one and a half years, the share of the manufacturer from Santa Clara in the relevant segment was approaching 100%, because few people were interested in the solutions of Opteron. Since the beginning of 2018, the volume of orders for the 14-nm EPYC CPU has grown at an impressive pace. Seeing this, Intel’s management did not wait for the outflow of large customers and responded in the form of discounts on current Xeon offers.

The Intel’s official price list on the spot markdown Xeon did not reflect, however, we have no reason not to believe the information shared with the public resource ServeTheHome, which specializes in high-performance computing systems.

According to a US source, some Intel customers were given substantial discounts on Xeon processors to prevent them from buying AMD EPYC. It is curious that these discounts were offered not only to the largest customers and on lots of much less than 1000 units. In percents the discounts reached double-digit numbers, so ServeTheHome recommended potential customers for at least 50–100 Intel Xeon-based servers to use an alternative AMD EPYC-based offer as an argument for a significant discount.

New servers based on AMD solution

Performance comparable to Xeon and often more attractive cost are not the only AMD EPYC trumps against competing CPUs. As we recently noted, due to the congestion of the 14nm processors, Intel has to limit the supply of related products, which affects both individual users and data centers, whose IT infrastructure needs to be switched to more powerful processors.

Against the background of Intel's problems, AMD expects to strengthen its position on the server market in cooperation with market leaders in designing EPYC-based servers. So in the summer, HPE presented two new single-processor systems for 8-, 16-, 24- and 32-core EPYC 7000 CPUs. Of particular interest was the ProLiant DL325 Gen10 server, which could replace 2P solutions with Xeon.

Cisco has introduced the server node UCS C125 M5, capable of simultaneously using the computing power of two EPYC processors. In addition to 64 (2 × 32) cores, the system can include up to 2 TB of RAM. The four UCS C125 M5 nodes form the UCS C4200 server, designed for demanding 24/7 computing.