AMD: We didn't think we were ahead of Intel at this point

During a presentation at the Barclays Technology Conference, AMD's Datacenter Group senior vice president, Forrest Norrod, said that the company did not expect to be ahead of Intel at this point in its path towards the return to competitiveness started (officially) in 2017.

“We had some deficits compared to Intel in applications that used few cores or threads. With Rome we have not only doubled throughput or even more in terms of doubling the cores per socket compared to the previous generation, but we have more than doubled compared to the current generation of Intel“.

“We also worked a lot on the IPC so that the architecture was faster with a few threads, and this was joined by the advantage of the production process that we have, albeit we originally planned to have parity on the process front with Intel, and we were really excited about it. “

“For the first time in industry, we will be breaking the laws of nature who have ruled the semiconductor industry for the past 30 years, which means breaking the fourth wall of semiconductor physics, with Intel having an advantage in terms of manufacturing processes. We were thrilled 4 years ago because we thought we could get parity. We could not have imagined that we would be ahead“.

“With Rome we have the leadership not only in loads related to throughput, not only in HPC and in the cloud or in large virtualized systems, where we were already well positioned with the first generation, but we are ahead in general, look at our 16 or 24 core products in a thread-by-thread comparison with Intel. “

“We are delivering significantly better performance and consumption. There is nothing more to hide, we are in front of practically across the board in the vast majority of workloads, except perhaps some that are optimized for some peculiarities of Intel's ISA. We think we are in an even better leadership position than initially expected“.

AMD aims to reach 10% of the server market in mid 2020 and rumors – rejected by Intel – that the company has problems with its roadmap have leaked in the past few hours. 2020 is expected to be an interlocutory year for Intel in the world of CPUs, while 2021 could be “year zero”, for a new beginning with the introduction of 7 nanometers, greater production at 10 nanometers and the return to a fixed production rate, with process improvements every two years.

In the meantime, AMD will certainly not be watching and in 2021 it should present solutions based on TSMC's 5-nanometer production process, to which obviously will be added the progress of Zen architecture and the ecosystem, with DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0. In short, it seems that the future holds rather exciting years for us on the CPU front.