UNITED STATES – AUGUST 13: The Intel 486 microprocessor (left) was introduced in 1989 and marked a … [+]
A shift is occurring in the microprocessor industry, particularly in the use of chips for data centers.
While there is more stability in the manufacturing of small devices, data centers are getting bigger and more powerful, and there are some big changes in the way customers are powering these larger networks.
Tom’s Guide reports that while Intel Xeon processors have traditionally powered many servers, AMD’s EPYC lineup is gaining ground.
This manifests in $3.5 billion for AMD’s data center segment in the third quarter, where Intel’s was around $3.3 billion (that’s down from $5-6 billion a few years ago).
AMD’s chips are cheaper, but that’s not the only factor. Some suggest that these new processors have some advantages over Intel’s products.
AMD’s Ryzen chips are turning heads, too, mostly in the gaming space.
“The first Zen 5 desktop CPUs were disappointing in gaming, but the 9800X3D, which arrives on November 7, makes some big improvements over the already excellent Ryzen 7 7800X3D,” writes Tom Warren for The Verge. “I’ve been testing it over the past week and found huge improvements in productivity workloads, along with about an 8 percent increase in gaming performance.”
Breakout sales from Nvidia
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s computing GPU sales were over $22 billion in the second quarter of this year, and in the first half of the year, the company apparently sold $42 billion of its GPU products. This includes the GB200, H100 and other models featuring TSMC’s CoWoS engineering.
I talked about their use in Colossus, where these ingredients are stacked from floor to ceiling and cooled with hundreds of liters of water.
Meanwhile, on the PC front, customers continue to use Intel and AMD for laptops and other personal devices.
Telecom providers, service providers, the US Department of Defense – they’re still using CPUs. But again, things are changing fast.
Now we have the integration of artificial intelligence into chips and wafer-etched transformers, and other kinds of creative innovations that will change the way we do computing in the AI age.)
Why the rush?
There is gold
Well, you could say we’re actually in a 21st century gold rush for enhanced capabilities. Soon, OpenAI models and others from companies like Anthropic are learning to do things we never thought possible. They are reasoning and using chains of thought in logical processes, and learning how to use physical computers like a human, and all of this is happening this year. This is just part of what people are seeing with the AI revolution in full swing. So the hardware world must move on, and here come these big changes.
I will continue to report on things I hear from our lectures and current events. There are plenty of experts talking about the applications and cases for all this gear, and many of them are consumer-facing, so those are things you’ll want to know about. And for the business crowd, enterprise technology is also changing incredibly fast. Watch this space.