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.

Continue reading

Report: LG Can’t Find Anyone to Buy Its Smartphone Business

LG has been trying to turn its mobile unit around for the last several years, but it has yet to pull out of the red. In early 2021, rumors suggested LG was looking to sell off its smartphone business. Now, a new South Korean report says LG has tried and failed to find a suitor, and the next step might just be to shut down the division entirely.

Report: LG Will Kill its Smartphone Business on April 5th

LG hasn't earned a profit on phones in years, and a leaked memo last month suggested the company was considering radical steps to change that. One option was to shutter the phone business entirely, and it's looking increasingly like that's what will happen.

Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

Apple is positioning its M1 quite differently from any CPU Intel or AMD has released. The long-term impact on the PC market could be significant.

Acer to Enter the SSD, DRAM Business With New Storage Hardware

Acer has plans to launch its own storage and DRAM products in the near future, built by Chinese company Biwin Storage Technology.