AMD Outsells Intel In the Datacenter For the First Time (tomshardware.com) 21
During the fourth quarter of 2024, AMD surpassed Intel in datacenter sales for the first time in history -- despite weaker-than-expected sales of its datacenter GPUs. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD's revenue in Q4 2024 totaled $7.658 billion, up 24% year-over-year. The company's gross margin hit 51%, whereas net income was $482 million. On the year basis, 2024 was AMD's best year ever as the company's revenue reached $25.8 billion, up 14% year-over-year. The company earned net income of $1.641 billion as its gross margin hit 49%. But while the company's annual results are impressive, there is something about Q4 results that AMD should be proud of.
Datacenter business was the company's primary source of earnings, with net revenue reaching record $3.86 billion in Q4, marking a 69% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 9% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) rise. Operating income also saw substantial improvement, surging 74% YoY to $1.16 billion. By contrast, Intel's datacenter and AI business unit posted $3.4 billion revenue, while its operating income reached $200 million. But while the quarter marked a milestone for AMD, market analysts expected AMD to sell more of its Instinct MI300-series GPUs for AI and HPC. You can view AMD's 2024 financial results here.
Datacenter business was the company's primary source of earnings, with net revenue reaching record $3.86 billion in Q4, marking a 69% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 9% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) rise. Operating income also saw substantial improvement, surging 74% YoY to $1.16 billion. By contrast, Intel's datacenter and AI business unit posted $3.4 billion revenue, while its operating income reached $200 million. But while the quarter marked a milestone for AMD, market analysts expected AMD to sell more of its Instinct MI300-series GPUs for AI and HPC. You can view AMD's 2024 financial results here.
Rather remarkable... (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD has pretty unambiguously had the better datacenter offering for the last 7 years or so. This is the first time since then that Intel is arguably on equal or better footing than AMD for Granite Rapids v. Turin and that's when AMD finally gets their deserved lead.
It's a shame about MI300, they put in a good showing there technically, but if it doesn't have nVidia branding then it's just left out of the party.
Re:Rather remarkable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. AMD's server chips have been clearly superior in several ways for years.
I'm curious how many shops are swapping hardware out along with their migrations off vmware.
Re:Rather remarkable... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the large cloud providers where the volume is, it's not yet GR vs Turin, it's at best Emerald Rapids vs Genoa. I benchmark the various VM types every year to keep us on the best performance/price (and publish them too to help others, e.g. here are the 2003 [dev.to] and the 2004 results [dev.to]) and AMD has been quite ahead on the curve for a while now as you say. That is until the last round when some Emerald Rapids solutions could best Genoa in various benchmarks and for the first time ever they do not carry a price premium (especially on GCP Intel was consistently priced higher). Emerald Rapids didn't prove as good in production loads though, so stayed on mostly AMD and we have to wait for Granite Rapids to give Intel another go. It will depend on what kind of implementation the cloud providers will go for (they get custom cpus/clock rates) and how much they will charge for them vs upcoming Turin.
But the market in general seems to be very inertial, so big companies were always buying Intel and it took many years of AMD having the best solution for the tide to turn, not sure how fast this can be reversed if Intel gets a competitive generation or two.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not just a branding thing, it's also AMD's perennial shit multi-GPU memory performance where decent hardware specs are sandbagged by terrible driver software so that, e.g., big PyTorch applications just don't perform well on AMD vs NVidia, even with theoretical higher bandwidth on the former. Note: this is the datacenter side. For graphics, the broken AMD driver design doesn't impose that much of a burden, its when big datacenter apps run on them that the suckage gets real.
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Even if AM
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MI300 is still selling very well, and they're pulling forward the MI350 launch which is going to make H2 2025 very good for AMD.
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It's a shame about MI300, they put in a good showing there technically, but if it doesn't have nVidia branding then it's just left out of the party.
One would think those stuffing large unmanned rooms with millions of dollars of computing hardware built for a purpose, would care FAR more about that purpose, than fashionable branding.
For data centers, the focus should be on performance. Leave the branding marketing to the iWhores already.
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Well, software wise, they have troubles. Which largely cripples the practicality of pretty good hardware.
But putting that aside, the problem is that ultimately those millions of dollars of computing hardware may be significantly deferred to people that may be able to navigate the nuance, but they answer to people that are very much brand tied. If it's a standalone company, their bosses are likely to demand nVidia. If they are a hosting provider that can in many ways do better by not being suckered in by tha
Somebody Is Getting Fired For Buying Intel (Score:2)
For an Intel/Nvidia fan for several decades, I finally built my first all AMD rig last year and I don't regret it one bit.
Definitely enjoying the new Intel/Nvidia shit show though.
Re: Somebody Is Getting Fired For Buying Intel (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Somebody Is Getting Fired For Buying Intel (Score:2)
Re: Somebody Is Getting Fired For Buying Intel (Score:2)
3 to 1 for the last several years... (Score:5, Interesting)
When you add up all the air-conditioning and power costs vs. cores per socket/per-rack unit... It's been $12/Intel cores per month vs. $4/AMD cores per month for several years now.
The cooling requirements are everything. The only place Intel has a lead is the HBM procs, which are kind of niche until AI creeps in. I'm going to guess AMD will fix that in a month or three....
T
Re: (Score:2)
It's mostly sold as a compute GPU part, but the Instinct MI300A is a combination of CPU and GPU cores in the same package, with HBM(24 zen4 cores; 228 CDNA3 CUs, 128GB HBM3); and that uses the same chiplets and infinity fabric arrangement that Ryzen and Epyc parts do to stitch together the CCDs and the I/O die; so it would appear that they have all the ingredients they n
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I'm not sure what drives AMD's planning; but it seems very likely that they could have HBM CPUs in fairly short order if they wanted to.
They probably have "Not invented here" syndrome. Consider, the Radeon line is sort of where the Opteron was back in the 2010's. It works, but its definitely second tier. Therefore the AI applications would make more $$ for NVIDIA than AMD would on the CPU's. They don't want to feed a rival. So they're probably playing their cards with an eye towards introducing a better AI solution along with the HBM capability. Or just waiting to see how the AI market evolves before committing resources. Right now th
Specified AMD servers in 2019 (Score:5, Informative)
We paid thousands less per server for 32 core single socket CPUs versus Intel's best (28 core at the time). I'm retired now, but my legacy keeps on keepin' on.
-Unapologetic AMD fanboy, including on my home PC.
10 years (Score:1)
I made numerous purchases, many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of servers over the last 10 years, all of them with AMD processors.
Even worse than it looks. (Score:3)
AMD sold $3.68 billion, operating income of $1.6 billion. Intel sold $3.4 billion, operating income $200 million.
AMD made a bit over half the revenue; but they made the vast majority of the profit(between the two; I'm sure Nvidia is laughing merrily in the corner). Aside from profit being useful to not go out of business; those starkly different margins suggest that AMD has a product that is better enough that they don't feel the need to play value underdog; while Intel is running out of room to even discount their way into sales(which is particularly dire given that they have fabs that they need to keep running).
Looks like a bloodbath, honestly.