Su’s strategic vision to lift Advanced Micro Devices from near-bankruptcy to the pinnacle of PC processors has taken a few years to realize. But now that the high-performance Zen chip design AMD first envisioned six years ago is in its third generation of actual products, sales are booming, reaching almost $9 billion over the past 12 months, a 44% gain from the prior year. And AMD’s stock price, under $2 a share in 2016, recently crossed $85—giving the company a stock market value of more than $100 billion. Su is looking to stoke further gains by using AMD’s stock to buy rival Xilinx for $35 billion to crack the chip market for cars and 5G mobile devices.

The AMD Threadripper pricing is much closer to "twice the price for twice the CPU". Yes, you end up paying more for the accoutrements (MB and cooling), but that's pretty much in line too. So yes, it ends up being more expensive, but if CPU power is what you want and need, the expense is pretty much in line with what you get.

AMD has their actual server CPU line too, and you do pay more for that privilege, but at least AMD doesn't try to screw you over and limit their non-server parts. So you do get ECC for Threadripper (and plain Ryzen) too, even if it's not necessarily "officially verified".

I'm personally very happy with AMD these days. I used to absolutely despise their horrible bulldozer cores, but I think they've had a home run with their Ryzen series and their chiplet approach. Not just because they fixed their cores, but because their chiplets made it so much easier to do the scaling they do and offer close to that "twice the cores for twice the price" model.

Intel with their HEDT and Xeon chips that required different boutique silicon (and thus the excessive pricing) is dead to me unless they seriously fix their sh*t. I've been complaining about their ECC policies here on this forum for about two decades by now. Good effing riddance - because once Intel stopped offering the best bang, there was absolutely no advantage to staying with them.

Linus

AMD EPYC processors enable Google Cloud to provide customers with industry leading performance and price-performance for scale-out workloads

SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Google Cloud today announced T2D, the first instance in the new family of Tau Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors. According to Google Cloud, the T2D instance offers 56% higher absolute performance and more than 40% higher price performance for scale-out workloads1.

The Tau VM family provides customers with a leading combination of performance, price, and easy integration. The T2D instances, using the leadership performance of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, excels at workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, data logging-processing, large scale Java® applications and more.

“At Google Cloud, our customers’ compute needs are evolving,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “By collaborating with AMD, Google Cloud customers can now leverage amazing performance for scale-out applications, with great price-performance, all without compromising x86 compatibility.”

“We designed 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to meet the growing demand from cloud and enterprise customers for high-performance, cost-effective solutions with optimal TCO,” said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “We work closely with Google Cloud and are proud they selected AMD to exclusively power the new Tau VM T2D instance which provides customers with powerful new options to run their most demanding scale-out workloads.”

The industry-leading2 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors allow Google Cloud customers to seamlessly integrate workloads with their existing x86 ecosystems, enabling applications and frameworks to work with the T2D instances. The new instances are offered in eight different predefined VM shapes, with up to 60 vCPUs per VM, and up to 4GB of memory per vCPU, making this technology ideal for scale-out workloads.

AMD EPYC processors power numerous instances at Google Cloud that support workloads including compute optimized, general purpose, high-performance and confidential computing. These instances are used by well-known cloud-native companies, spanning multiple industries, providing high-performance cloud instances for their workloads.

T2D instances will be available in Q3 and customers can sign up for a preview here.

(Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud on Thursday said Google will offer cloud computing services based on AMD's newest data center chip, a move likely to intensify AMD's push to grab market share from rival Intel Corp.

Cloud computing providers such as Google, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp are some of the biggest buyers of data center chips. They build services on top of the chips to rent the computing power out to millions of customers.

Google said on Thursday it will start offering services based on AMD's "Milan" server chip, which AMD released in March. Google said customers such as Snap Inc and Twitter Inc are testing the new AMD-based services.

AMD has been gaining market share against Intel, which was long the dominant player in data center chips but whose offerings have inferior performance on some measures because of years of stumbles in Intel's manufacturing operations.

Intel in April announced its "Ice Lake" chip competitor to AMD's "Milan" chip and said all major cloud providers would support it, but Intel has not said when Google will start offering services based on its latest chip. (BURN!)