AMD Signs Up Meta in Another Big Win on Server Customers (bloomberg.com) 58
Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.
Too bad (Score:1)
Hey AMD, didn't anyone ever tell you about lying down with dogs? When you end up flea-bit, don't come crying.
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They're hardware. Just what kind of fleas do you think they'll get?
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They're hardware. Just what kind of fleas do you think they'll get?
Moral fleas. But meta/facebook would buy those servers nomatter what and because of that, I'd rather the money goes to AMD than to Intel, because AMD needs the cash more than Intel does. The more AMD can grow, the better competition we can get in the future and hopefully also lower prices as a result in the long term.
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Meta buys from AMD. Same as anybody else buying from AMD. AMD does not actually have a say in this.
I don't know what to think! (Score:3, Interesting)
The Epyc line is great!
Meta sucks!
I'm so confused right now!
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"Intel sucks!"
"Meta sucks!"
"Go team red!"
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If someone is basing how well something is by the people who buy the thing, then those people will forever be angry about something they can never change.
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Certainly you can think of at least one extreme example where you would judge a company based on its customers?
Re: I don't know what to think! (Score:2)
You mean like IBM, whose president was well aware the holocaust was occurring and chose to supply the Nazis with computers and punch cards to make it more efficient?
Re: I don't know what to think! (Score:1)
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Okay fine
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Not up there with IBM but
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Good job! You win a cookie.
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Trump wears shoes and Trump sucks but that doesn't mean that shoes suck...
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I know what to think: one shitty name deserves another.
Is this the best we can do now? Epyc? Meta? Awful.
Meta commercials (Score:3)
The hype for Meta is singularly weird. There is no product yet, and the commercials are showing a product that couldn't possibly exist in the next 10 years. Also, the commercials are remarkably bad. remember the Magic Leap commercials? [youtube.com] At least with the Magic Leap, you wanted the device, even if it was vaporware. With Meta, it's vaporware and not really something you want. Like this, the experience looks worse than regular life [youtube.com].
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They probably want to change Facebook itself to "Meta" eventually, because "Facebook" sounds like a creepy perv's secret bang-list. Thus, they are going to gradually work it into their apps.
until somebody prominent jokes, "I meta creepy perv on Meta".
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They want to change it because Facebook is rapidly becoming the Exxon Valdez of tech giants.
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Is this how Facebook does a Myspace?
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Nah. They don't have Tom.
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The new name should be Dicky McDickface
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Distinctly reminiscent of the hype over Stadia, and destined for the same uptake.
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They do have offerings under the Meta name (all things Oculus, and now all software within the Facebook division).
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My own take that is that Facebook doesn't really care whether they'll ever get to Meta. They were only interested in getting the announcement out there so that any other company won't get much publicity by announcing something similar other than to have everyone compare it to Facebooks' vaporware. You must learn to think like a marketeer, i.e., Zuck.
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Nah. They just want to inject a narrative into the media that's something other than "Facebook is poisoning the minds of youth, contributing to the death of democracy, increasing levels of depression and anxiety, and generally is bad for society at large."
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Nah. They just want to inject a narrative into the media that's something other than "Facebook is poisoning the minds of youth, contributing to the death of democracy, increasing levels of depression and anxiety, and generally is bad for society at large."
And they've clearly succeeded, as this story shows.
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Sounds good. Hopefully this hype campaign presages their decline.
Facebook ARM servers? (Score:2)
Did Facebook give up on creating its own line of open ARM servers? The AMD systems are quite nice, but I thought they had economies of scale and special-enough-purpose tasks to make a general-purpose CPU inefficient.
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Re:Facebook ARM servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nvidia's intentions towards ARM took the wind out of the ARM server sails. No big operator wants to end up stretched over the Nvidia single source barrel.
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That doesn't make any sense. The merger isn't approved yet, and it wouldn't affect any existing licenses. Assuming Facebook has an ARMv9 license, they're free to tinker with their own cores in perpetuity.
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And when ARM introduces new cores or peripherals?
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Nvidia never plays nice.
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So what? ARMv9 was just launched recently. They can stay on the old standard. ARMv8 is still viable. ARMv9 doesn't even exist in commercial silicon yet.
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So buzzkill, that's what.
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Buzzkill in like . . . 2031 or later, whenever ARM releases ARMv10 and it starts to matter. ARMv9 is going to last a long time on the market. ARMv8 was first introduced in 2011 and it still exists in X1, A78, etc.
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Buzzkill now. ARM buzz ended. Sorry you live on a different planet. How's the coffee over there at nvidia?
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Um what?
You don't understand
They have a license already. NV can't take it away from them. They're developing ARM CPUs internally. What else do you not get? NV can't touch them for about a decade, and they maintain interoperability. If they stick with ARMv9 then NV can't touch them, ever.
Do you not understand how this works?
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They? "Everybody"?
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"They're" license extends to any changes Nvidia might make to ARM in the future?
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And what you don't understand is, it's the ARM buzz that died. It doesn't care about you or your fanciful arguments.
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Broadly speaking, these large companies have mulitple bets being hedged.
To the extent Facebook 'creates' their hardware, for the most part it's only a bit more specific than usual requests from the board vendors to do something. Facebook makes their procurement process as a marketing point. There are occasionally specific things that come out of it, but by and large it's a bit much to characterize Facebook as 'creating' anything they announce under the opencompute umbrella.
However, ARM systems are still g
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Did Facebook give up on creating its own line of open ARM servers?
Unlikely. Rather there is a different market use case for someone investing in low power ARM and someone investing in EPYC. I'll wager EPYC finds its way into image processing or other high performance parts of their data centres, while the ARM will serve up data from disk to customers.
Two very different use cases.
Which meta? (Score:2)
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Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly Facebook Inc.) goes by the tradename "Meta"
The registered tradename "Meta" belonged to a data science company which the CZI (chan zuckerberg institute) acquired 3 years ago. They announced that they would shut down that "project" and transfer all IP to Meta Platforms Inc., thus transferring previously-registered Meta directly to Facebook, now Meta Platforms.
As for the other Meta-branded companies (like Meta Company), they still have precedent claims
Not so fast (Score:1)
It makes sense to cultivate two server suppliers to at least have a "spare", but that doesn't necessarily mean AMD will receive a lot of orders, it only means their foot is in the door.
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It means Intel is going to do something random in response.
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No, that's their CPU's ;-)
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Now that they've accepted AMD devices for deployment they can use this as leverage for negotiations with Intel. They win whether or not they ever buy a single AMD device.
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This is an extremely common strategy in these vendors in general. The team will frequently have the crappy vendor they don't *really* want to buy from that exists merely to threaten the cheapest of the vendors they are willing to go with.
Of course, I don't think the crappy vendor accurately describes AMD, but the general concept of 'qualified' vendor with minimal volume is a pretty common strategy.
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The term "crappy vendor" might indeed accurately describe AMD - at least if you want to buy a sufficient large number of processors.
If you want to buy a processor, you can easily buy AMD.
If you want to buy a thousand processors, you can easily buy AMD.
Yet, with "only" a million Ryzen processors built in Q4 2020, if you want to buy two million processors per quarter you're forced to go to a less crappy producer.
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The datacenter market is weird and AMD will take everything they can get for marketing collateral. Any data point to validate AMD in the datacenter is needed, as those customers frequently buy inferior product at price premiums just because it's the closest match to what they did before. Unfortunately showing up with better product at lower cost isn't by itself enough to capture business in the industry.
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Compatibility with your house stack/config does matter. It's a matter of finding the break-even point between the labor savings of compatibility versus getting newer more efficient stuff.
> XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Please update your sig to say JSON. The microservice puppies are pissing all over.
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True, it is outdated. I have to confess compared to the ways XML were used I'm much less bothered by JSON generally speaking, though often something like messagepack would make a lot more sense at least where over-the-network IPC makes sense (microservices people do tend to go over the network far more than is reasonable). Admittedly some have tried really hard to bring some of the ugliness over with horribly complex schemas, at the end of the day it's still easier to work with in its typical scenarios.
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Well, Intel does not have anything to match AMD in the DC sphere. So it is no surprise that AMD makes sales.
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Are you kidding me? I buy a LOT of compute about every year or so. It's nothing compared to what FB or any of the public cloud providers purchase annually, but it's a pretty significant chunk of change. Intel doesn't come anywhere close to the density and power footprint of Epyc right now. Intel is more expensive, less dense, and uses more power per core. It's not even close. Perhaps there are some specific workloads where it would pay to spend more for Intel, but I haven't found one in my environment
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If Intel servers are that bad, why are they still the market leader?