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AMD has deployed a team of folks to charm enterprise server users ahead of the debut of its Zen designed-from-scratch x86 processor microarchitecture and the message they're sending is that the new silicon represents a chance to supersize servers.
As explained to The Register by Vinay Sinha, AMD's senior director for enterprise in Asia Pacific and Japan, the company's plan is first and foremost to convince enterprise that Zen will be stonking x86 CPUs. Beyond that, the company will point out that its significantly-lower-than-Xeon prices mean a chance to supersize servers with other nice-to-haves, perhaps more RAM or some lovely AMD GPUs.
AMD's tried this play in the PC market, where its newly-hired enterprise sales folks have had some success in price-sensitive markets like government and education where buyers want maximum bang for buck and don't see challenger brands as a risk. Big PC-makers also enjoy the company's pricing, as it gives them different price points. Speaking to The Reg at the Canalys Channels Forum in Macau, Sinha takes great heart from the fact that the likes of HP Inc. now offer AMD-powered premium notebooks. HPE, he said, will offer enterprise servers based on Zen. He feels other top-tier manufacturers won't be shy about practicing Zen and the art of server design so they too can show Chipzilla it can't take their business for granted.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by steveha on Friday October 28 2016, @06:30PM
I'm very fond of my HP microservers using old AMD Turion II "mobile" processor: http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/HP_MicroServer_N40L_Wiki [wikia.com]
I would very much like an update with a faster CPU.
HP's current microservers [hpe.com] are using Intel chips, but I am hoping that they will have AMD models again once Zen launches.
P.S. I try very hard to not buy any Intel products because I don't believe in supporting a company that cheats. They are currently making better CPUs than AMD so they could win even if they were playing fairly, and even still they are cheating. The Intel C and C++ compilers deliberately emit code that runs poorly on any non-Intel processors; it's always code that works, but just really slow code, to make the competition look bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C++_Compiler#Criticism [wikipedia.org]