logoalt Hacker News

asimovDev • today at 5:22 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

do people / businesses even buy Xeons anymore? Any used server from the last 5 years I see is always EPYC and all VM services I see are EPYCs unless something ancient that is still on a Xeon E5 from like 2015


Replies

adrian_b • today at 5:52 PM

There are many years since AMD's EPYC CPUs have been greatly superior to Intel's Xeons and Intel has not succeeded to match them (Intel has a hope with the future Diamond Rapids Xeons, which are their first CPUs since 2019 that have a good chance to match AMD's).

In the last few years Intel's division that makes Xeons had huge losses, because in order to retain their big customers they had to accept to sell at big discounts, otherwise the customers would have switched to AMD.

All has changed this year, due to the AI craze.

AMD has sold all the server CPUs that it could make, within its allocations at TSMC. Everybody who did not succeed to buy EPYCs has bought Intel Granite Rapids Xeons, because they are not made at TSMC, but in Intel's fabs, so they did not compete with other TSMC customers for allocations.

So Intel has also sold every server CPU that they could make, and they are now trying to retool some fab that made new Panther Lake CPUs back to the obsolete Intel 3 CMOS manufacturing process, in order to make more Xeons, to sell them as long as this huge demand persists.

Thus in the last quarter both AMD and Intel have sold less consumer CPUs than in the past, because all who could did delay their upgrade plans due to the unacceptable memory prices, but on the other hand both AMD and Intel had record revenues and profits from selling server CPUs.