AMD finally beats Intel in server revenue, but surprise surprise, Nvidia's still miles ahead
Much as I might instinctually recoil at the suggestion, the server rather than the desktop market is the big growth area right now. I'm told that this is thanks to a newfangled thing called «artificial intelligence», which is why Nvidia, proverbial emperor of the AI crowd, is doing so well and expects to keep doing well with Blackwell. But Nvidia's not the only player in the server market, and there's a change afoot elsewhere, over in the land of datacentre CPUs.
The change in question is that AMD has, for the first time ever, outsold Intel in the datacentre market, bringing home a trend that's been a long time coming. This is coming from X user Sravan Kundojjala of SemiAnalysis (via Tom's Hardware), who charts the datacentre revenue for the two companies against Nvidia's networking revenue.
The reason SemiAnalysis charts it against Nvidia's similar amount of networking revenue is to demonstrate that AMD's and Intel's server revenue is still very far behind Nvidia's overall datacentre revenue—Nvidia's networking division is small beans compared to its compute division, after all.
Talking actual numbers, now, Intel's Q3 AI and datacentre revenue was $3.3 billion while AMD's was $3.5 billion. For reference, Nvidia's Q2 datacentre revenue was $26.3 billion—in other words, over three times AMD's and Intel's Q3 datacentre revenue combined.
That's no surprise, though. GPUs—sorry, «AI accelerators»—are expensive, and AI workloads require a whole load of them to churn through all that data. But CPUs are needed for servers, too, and in this area, AMD's finally caught up with and surpassed Intel.
AMD overtook Intel for the first time in data center revenue in 3Q24. But, their DC revenue scale is small that they are less than NVIDIA's networking (non compute) revenue alone. pic.twitter.com/3LEGTkDF8TNovember 3, 2024
AMD's been taking bites out of Intel's lead for a while, now, but it wasn't always so close. AMD Epyc processor shares used to hold barely a candle to Intel Xeon
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