AMD's plans to take on Intel in the server market

When it comes to the high-powered computing market and data center sectors, Intel has had a firm lead over the competition for some time.

However this may all be about to change, after AMD revealed its plans to fight back with its new EPYC 7000 series of data center processors.

Offering a fully scalable solution that it says can out-perform Intel’s offerings, AMD’s EPYC was revealed to the world at an event in Austin, Texas, attended by ITProPortal.

The launch was not just a spontaneous decision though, as AMD CTO Mark Papermaster revealed at a media briefing before the launch event.

"We didn't just wake up and back into this kind of solution -- this is what we set out to do," Papermaster said. "At AMD, we had a fundamental decision to make -- where was the market going, and how do we drive our technology, and our products, to be there?"

"We looked at the industry and saw the explosion of data -- it was already clear that there would be a plethora of devices, creating a massive amount of data that would have to be processed to make it useful... and we knew that to make it useful, you would need it to be processed in the cloud."

In such a highly competitive market, then, AMD knew it had to offer something truly different in order to stand out, and Papermaster claims that the EPYC 7000 series could do just that.

"We've re-engineered engineering," he said, "We wanted to be differentiated -- both in our CPU, our GPU, and how we put it together."

"You can't fool anybody when it comes to the data center... a one size solution doesn't fit all anymore."

"AMD has designed EPYC to deliver performance not just for the workloads that we know today, but for the explosive market around machine intelligence and workloads that can level machine accelerators."

With the new chips available now, and an ecosystem that includes industry heavyweights such as Lenovo, HPE and Samsung, it seems that the EPYC series could already be along the way to becoming a success for AMD as it looks to re-launch itself in this market.

Papermaster underlined the company’s enthusiasm and ambition, noting that the move had been five years in the making, so it was keen to make a success of it.

"AMD is delivering on what we promised," he concluded. "This is just the beginning to get us back into high performance -- and you have our commitment that we are back to stay."

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Future plc Publication. All rights reserved.

Photo Credit: Faiz Zaki/Shutterstock