Electronics

AMD’s stock soars 16% day after Rome chip launch: 10 quick insights

By Matt Hamblen Aug 8, 2019 10:33am
Microprocessors AMD
  1. AMD’s stock soared on Thursday by 16.2% one day after the company launched its second generation EPYC Rome CPU. The stock price was nearly $33 per share at 10 a.m. eastern time on Thursday then rose to $33.92 by market close. (It might also help that CEO Lisa Su tweeted on Tuesday that she’s staying in her job.)
  2. Rome comes with up to 64 Zen 2 cores and 7nm process technology. AMD claims it has set 80 performance world records. Here’s the entire list of records:
  3. AMD claimed Rome delivers 25% to 50% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than competitive offerings but didn’t name Intel directly. In its press release, footnote 3, AMD referred to a Twitter finding of 25% TCO.
  4. Pricing runs the gamut for Rome models: $450 to $6,950 per Ku. (The lowest price is for 8 cores and the highest for 64 cores.)
  5. AMD named a slew of Rome customers such as: Google (for cloud compute and new general purpose machines. Twitter (across its entire data center later in 2019); Microsoft (for Azure virtual machines); HPE (for its ProLiant line of servers); Cray (for an Air Force Weather Cray Shasta System); Lenovo (for its ThinkSystem for video, virtualization, software defined storage); Dell (for upcoming newly designed servers, unnamed); VMWare (for a collaboration on security with EPYC and VMWare vSphere).
  6. More AMD bragging rights for Rome: in the datacenter, up to 83% better Java app performance and up to 43% better SAP SD 2 Tier performance than unnamed competitors. For HPC, a record for floating point performance and DRAM memory.
  7. With 64 cores, Rome delivers up to 23% more instructions per clock than previous EPYC chips and 4 times more L3 cache.
  8. AMD server CPUs of all styles made up 6% of all servers shipped in the second quarter of 2019, according to IHS Markit. The total server market was 11.4 million shipped in 2018, and each server runs up to 1.8 CPUs.
  9. Intel is still king and will be for a long time, because it has such a big installed base. In 2016, Intel had 99% share of server CPUs, but that could drop to 80% by 2024 if AMD and Arm-based CPUs are successful, IHS believes.
  10. Arm-based CPUs from Marvell, Ampere and AWS will make up 3% to 4% of the server CPU market in five years, IHS believes.

RELATED: AMD takes aim at server CPU giant Intel with 7nm Rome chip

Microprocessors AMD