[8draco8]

No one got ever fired for buying Intel

Even if Ryzen will be twice as fast enterprise will still go with Intel. Unless some company with reasonable size (like DigitalOcean or Linode) will adopt Ryzen in their servers and brag about it.

[loeg]

We are absolutely looking at buying large quantities of (Ry)zen, if the numbers work out. We're most concerned about multi-core / NUMA penalty compared to Intel.

I assume we also get some sort of volume discount with Intel that may not be reflected in consumer pricing. But maybe we would get the same with AMD.

Also, CPUs are a tiny tiny portion of our costs of goods sold. So in the end, it doesn't matter too much how expensive Intel is relative to AMD. That said, we would prefer to see competition for the long run.

[kogepathic]

> No one got ever fired for buying Intel

Even after the whole kerfuffle about Intel paying off OEMs? [0] They got some pretty huge fines for that.

But in all seriousness, I think that if Ryzen can hit the perf/watt numbers of Intel, companies will seriously look at purchasing AMD systems again.

Back in the NetBurst days, lots of people were buying Opteron servers because they kicked the pants off Intel. If AMD can prove their competitive with Intel again in the data center market, people will buy their chips.

Competition is always good, even for large enterprise, and if the TCO of an AMD Ryzen system becomes on par with Intel, enterprise will happily pit them against each other in a price war. Enterprise will absolutely buy from both.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/dell_intel/index....

[masklinn]

> No one got ever fired for buying Intel

Exactamently. Even if Ryzen has a way better performance/price ratio than Intel, it's a risk:

* risk of losing favour with Intel or vendors (aka getting "renegotiated contract")

* support risk

* less coherent hardware risk

* software compatibility risk

Ryzen is lot of risk, and the reward is not huge because at the end of the day CPU is a pretty minor investment. Unless Intel completely fucks up a generation as they did with P4 few company will be willing to take that risk. Hell even then most companies remained on the Intel ship.

[LordKano]

I suspect that Intel would offer hardware nearly at cost to convince them to do otherwise.

[andrew53]

Microsoft used (and still does) AMD CPUs for their first generation of Azure cloud instances. This did not do much in promoting AMD.