[joemag]

Interesting pricing decision by AMD. Given their performance, and no other competition in x86 market besides Intel, surprised they chose to sell at such a steep discount.

Sometimes, such pricing decisions can perpetuate “you are a weaker substitute” perception.

[derefr]

Nobody switches a big contract from one vendor to another because of a 2x ROI disparity. 5x is about the threshold where you start to feel like it’d be irresponsible to your shareholders to not switch, despite the switching costs.

[gumby]

I don't know why your comment was downvoted. This kind of metric is typical for the enterprise (where cap ex is only part of the equation), and Tom's hardware specifically called out relevance to the enterprise:

> The Geekbench 4 benchmark holds little to no relevance in the enterprise world. Nevertheless, it gives us a small taste of how AMD's EPYC 7002-series can provide enterprises with more bang for their buck.

In short this comment is appropriate.

[catexception]

You are correct that customers that already use both Intel and AMD would likely choose AMD over Intel even with a price difference of 10% if they were deciding on price/performance ratio. However, I think it's likely that AMD is trying to win market share from customers that are currently mostly using Intel. In my humble opinion that strategy is paying off now that more big shops such as Amazon AWS have AMD options.

[localhost]

Lisa Su is on record as talking about revenue / market share being a key focus:[1]

“We are always looking to increase our market share. That’s why we put out great products. As it relates to our market share targets, for server what we’ve said is we can achieve double digit market share from 4-6 quarters from the end of 2018.”

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14579/all-ryzen-qa-with-amd-c...

[SteveNuts]

It's a smart decision in the era of public clouds, for sure. On-prem shops will be more hesitant because with things like VMware you can't hot move VMs between differing CPU architectures. In order to win these customers over you have to have longevity (that you'll still be the price/performance in 5 years when you lifecycle your hardware).

[sunstone]

The "'weaker substitute' perception" aspect might happen in consumer goods but unlikely to happen when Google, Amazon and Microsoft consider provisioning a new data center.

[martamoreno2]

I think you are wrong. Consumers use to save money, the masses at least. They won't give a shit about these details, most of them don't even know what it means. They pick the cheaper option, across the board. There might be some Intel fanboys with 5000$ machines, but those are the minority.

With businesses it is quite different. Money comes cheap. You can not get fired for buying IBM... To convince companies like Google & Amazon to build a data-center around a one-off delivery from AMD is pushing the boundaries. Now if they are 5 times cheaper, these companies might be more willing to consider betting on this outlandish horse. If it was 10% cheaper, I don't see how they could risk it, at least not at scale and scale is what AMD is interested in. Once they have some buy in at these dumping prices from large data centers, then they will sure raise the price unless Intel follows the dumping price strategy.

Not to mention that there are also other problems with business, like vendor lock-in. Consumers don't really have that problem either. They will buy what's cheaper, because they didn't sign a 10 billion $ discount from Intel for keep buying Intel in the future.

[Shorel]

> To convince companies like Google & Amazon to build a data-center around a one-off delivery from AMD is pushing the boundaries.

AWS offers AMD instances already, and they are advertized specifically as being AMD. I found them 10% cheaper, with about 30% of the performance of the equivalent Intel instance.

Actual result of a test I did: m5.xlarge vs m5a.xlarge. The m5a.xlarge is 10% cheaper, but I found it takes four times the amount of seconds to perform some CPU and RAM heavy calculation than the m5.xlarge instance.

So no, it being cheaper saves me no money, because the performance is not there yet.

[AareyBaba]

Those are first gen 14nm Epyc instances - correct ? This article is discussing the third gen 7nm Epyc.

[The_rationalist]

I don't see how they could risk it

What non existent risk are you talking about?

[BubRoss]

This isn't a lifestyle brand like whiskey or hand bags, CPU performance, power consumption and system price are all fairly easy to quantify.

[trhway]

Our BigCo catalog contains only few high-core 1x/2x Xeons. Our huge C++ project linearly benefits from hardware performance, yet there is no way one can get anything outside of the catalog. The product is also certified to run only on Intel, so our customers are running only Intel.

[n1000]

I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to win back market-shares for a few years before choosing less competitive pricing.