The global server market is growing while Intel is losing market share. This is the result of estimates by various market observers. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates third quarter sales of server processors 2020 at 22, 6 billion US dollars, the equivalent of 18, 5 billion euros. Compared to the previous year, this corresponds to an increase of 2.2 percent.

Server with x 86 – processors from Intel (mainly Xeon) and AMD (Epyc) made around 21 billion US dollars 93 percent of the market. The small “Non-x 86” – remainder is mainly attributable to IBM systems with power processors and the expensive Z mainframes. But ARM servers are slowly making themselves felt.

According to IDC, AMD has reduced sales of its own Epyc processors within a year by 112, 4 percent increased. This fits in with AMD’s last quarterly report, according to which the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom division increased its sales to more than 1, 13 Has doubled billion US dollars – this also includes the console processors for the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X as well as Instinct GPU accelerators.

Current figures on market allocation between IDC does not name AMD, Intel and other chip manufacturers. Mercury Research stated in November that AMD’s share in the pure server comparison Epyc vs. Intel Xeon SP last at 12, 1 percent was – with a strong trend upwards.

ARM grows Besides AMD’s Epyc, ARM server processors are also starting to nibble on Intel’s market share. IDC estimates that sales of ARM processors increased by more than 430 percent within a year, but starting from a small base per year 2019.

Amazon in particular is promoting the use of the ARM processors Graviton and Graviton2 developed in-house in the AWS cloud business, because the EC2 instances running on them are simply cheaper than comparable x 86 – instances. For example, according to a tweet from its CEO Don MacAskill, the photo service Flickr plans to put all cloud services that do not require GPU instances on Graviton machines.

An analysis by financial advisor Jefferies showed that in August 2020 around a tenth of all AWS instances were running on Gravitons. AMD’s share was accordingly above average at Amazon with 20 percent: Among the four large cloud operators Alibaba, Amazon, Google and Microsoft had of the chipmaker an average market share of , 8 percent. Intel came up with “only” 84, 3 percent.

(mma)