Data Center CPU Landscape Allows Ampere Computing to Gain Traction

[AleksandarK]

Once upon a time, the data center market represented a duopoly of x86-64 makers AMD and Intel. However, in recent years companies started developing custom Arm-based processors to handle workloads as complex within smaller power envelopes and doing it more efficiently. According to Counterpoint Research firm, we have the latest data highlighting a significant new player called Ampere Computing in the data center world. With the latest data center revenue share report, we get to see Intel/AMD x86-64 and AWS/Ampere Arm CPU revenue. For the first time, we see that a 3rd party company, Ampere Computing, managed to capture as much as 1.54% market revenue share of the entire data center market in 2022. Thanks to having CPUs in off-the-shelf servers from OEMs, enterprises and cloud providers are able to easily integrate Ampere Altra processors.

Intel, still the most significant player, saw a 70.77% share of the overall revenue; however, that comes as a drop from 2021 data which stated an 80.71% revenue share in the data center market. This represents a 16% year-over-year decline. This reduction is not due to the low demand for server processors, as the global data center CPU market's revenue registered only a 4.4% YoY decline in 2022, but due to the high demand for AMD EPYC solutions, where team red managed to grab 19.84% of the revenue from 2022. This is a 62% YoY growth from last year's 11.74% revenue share. Slowly but surely, AMD is eating Intel's lunch. Another revenue source comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which the company filled with its Graviton CPU offerings based on Arm ISA. AWS Graviton CPUs accounted for 3.16% of the market revenue, up 74% from 1.82% in 2021.



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[JAB Creations]

I've been presuming they intend market share as installed servers overall instead of referencing quarterly sales.

Also if Intel and Nvidia weren't so damned anti-consumer, anti-competitive and anti-capitalist the respective markets wouldn't be so consolidated to begin with.

 

[AnotherReader]

I've been presuming they intend market share as installed servers overall instead of referencing quarterly sales.

The article states:

Intel, still the most significant player, saw a 70.77% share of the overall revenue

This suggests that they aren't counting the installed base; rather, they are only counting servers shipped in a year. I wonder how they have ascribed revenue to AWS's Graviton.

 

[dragontamer5788]

referencing quarterly sales

Marketshare always means sales, not currently installed servers.

The big winners of that graph are AMD, followed by Amazon AWS. Ampere has blipped up above 1% marketshare, but its growth is slower compared to AMD or AWS.

I'm rooting for Ampere. Another player, albeit using standard ARM N cores, is good for the market and good for competition. I'm surprised at how well Amazon's Graviton is doing though (also a small player)

 

[Daven]

Go “A” team! (AMD, Ampere, Amazon)

 

[GreiverBlade]

wel as long as the %age gained for Ampere come from Intel's share, athough almost more impressed at AMD which even grew quit a bit, imppressive almost 20%
it's all good ...

i prefer all player that do good in a sector to have fair shares ... but nothing is fair hehe ... oh well ... intel can still probably still loose some % more later ... they have way enough.

 

[Wirko]

It would be interesting to know who those "Others" are, and a brief overview of what the next 3-4 players have on offer. Their combined market share isn't negligible, it equals Amazon plus Ampere and most certainly it's growing.

One example - Cerebras wafer scale engine. Does it count as a datacenter CPU and is it part of these statistics here?

 

[Daven]

It would be interesting to know who those "Others" are, and a brief overview of what the next 3-4 players have on offer. Their combined market share isn't negligible, it equals Amazon plus Ampere and most certainly it's growing.

One example - Cerebras wafer scale engine. Does it count as a datacenter CPU and is it part of these statistics here?

IBM still offers Power processors which are used in two of the top ten supercomputers. I’m sure a good portion of other servers use Power processors.

 

[Wirko]

IBM still offers Power processors which are used in two of the top ten supercomputers. I’m sure a good portion of other servers use Power processors.

And the IBM Z! I'm sure it still has a considerable market share in certain industries such as banking.

 

[dragontamer5788]

And the IBM Z! I'm sure it still has a considerable market share in certain industries such as banking.

The amount of money spent in replicating the COBOL environment of 1960 is insane.

To be fair: COBOL is uniquely suited for banking, because very few programming languages implement decimal floats. The value "$20.03" in Decimal Float is precise, but cannot be represented exactly in IEEE754 Floats. IIRC, there's some banking regulations that assume decimal floats and decimal rounding, so the floating point + binary rounding of most programming languages just doesn't work.