AMD’s Epyc Wins New Business With Yahoo Japan

Ever since it launched Ryzen a year ago, AMD’s investors have been pushing for the company to pick up more server customers. It’s not hard to see why — cloud computing, edge computing, data centers, HPC, AI, machine learning, and similar topics are generating most of the buzz and growth in the computer industry, while PC OEMs mostly pray that after years of declines the PC market has finally stopped shrinking. AMD has already won business with two of the major hyperscale providers, Microsoft and Baidu, and launched a new line of servers with Dell. Now it’s adding another customer — Yahoo Japan.

Yes, this means AMD is now big in Japan.

Yahoo Japan’s new servers are based on the Dell PowerEdge R6415 and use the AMD Epyc 7551P. That’s a single-socket CPU with 32 cores, 64 threads, a 2GHz base clock, 2.55GHz all-core boost, and 3GHz single-core boost frequency. It’s the highest-end single-socket server CPU that AMD sells.

“Yahoo Japan’s deployment of EPYC marks a notable achievement for our new family of processors,” said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Enterprise Solutions. “Japan plays a key role in the evolution of the data center market and all the adjacent industries that depend on those data centers.”

It’s not clear how much revenue AMD will earn this year in server, but Lisa Su has said the company is targeting mid-single digits for server market share by the end of 2018. As targets go, that seems eminently achievable. Winning space with companies like Yahoo is a vital part of AMD’s overall push to establish itself as a credible alternative to Intel. Reviews of Epyc in workstation contexts are thin on the ground, but a recent workstation comparison at ZDNet found that you can buy substantially more AMD CPU cores for the same amount of money — +20 cores on the Epyc 7551 dual-socket system, compared with the equivalently priced Xeon Gold 6152.

Will such victories dismantle Intel’s server market in one fell swoop? Obviously not. But that’s the good thing about being AMD in this market — every server it ships represents new revenue. When you’re rebuilding from scratch, every socket is upside.