Recently, the authoritative market research firm Mercury Research released the market share statistics for AMD processors in the fourth quarter of 2023, which can be described as a resounding success.
Whether in desktops, laptops, or server data centers, AMD processors are experiencing rapid growth, especially the remarkable performance of EPYC in the data center domain, leaving a lasting impression.
When it comes to measuring market share for products, there are generally two dimensions: one is based on shipment volume, and the other is based on revenue. Regardless of which dimension you look at, AMD EPYC shines.
In terms of shipment volume, AMD EPYC has captured a remarkable 23.1% share of the server market, showing a significant increase of 5.5 percentage points compared to the fourth quarter of 2022, which is an exceptionally rare speed in its entire history.
In terms of revenue, AMD EPYC is even more impressive, commanding a share of 31.1%, marking a 4.0 percentage point increase year-over-year and a further 1.1 percentage point increase sequentially.
After the introduction of the EPYC architecture by Zen, it quickly gained acclaim in terms of performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, offering a fresh alternative in the industry and winning over numerous practitioners.
Subsequently, EPYC has continued to evolve and upgrade on the product front, with its performance and efficiency improving steadily, leading to a remarkable increase in market share.
According to historical data from Mercury Research, the shipment share of AMD EPYC exceeded 3% by the end of 2018, surpassed 5% in early 2020, exceeded 10% in the third quarter of 2021, and crossed the significant threshold of 20% in the third quarter of 2023.
What's even more remarkable is that the growth of EPYC has remained consistently stable, continuously gaining market share without any noticeable setbacks, even temporarily.
It's worth noting that the server and data center market places a premium on long-term stability and has rigorous demands for processor performance and ecosystem. AMD EPYC's leap forward over seven years can be considered nothing short of miraculous.
Over the past 7 years, through four generations of architecture and product evolution, AMD EPYC has become virtually unstoppable, excelling in high-performance computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence, cloud services, 5G and communication infrastructure, virtualization, and various other domains.
The latest fourth-generation EPYC is arguably the most powerful general-purpose processor in the world today, with virtually no rivals in sight from any angle.
It boasts a brand-new 5nm manufacturing process, a revolutionary Zen 4 architecture, Chiplet chip layout with up to 96 cores and 192 threads, a massive 384MB of L3 cache, a top speed of 4.4GHz, support for up to 12 channels of DDR5-4800 memory (with a single-path maximum capacity of 6TB), up to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0, CXL 1.1+ high-speed interconnect standard, and a newly upgraded encryption engine.
The fourth-generation EPYC also introduces a segmentation into four distinct sub-series, each tailored to specific application domains and scenarios.
Among them, the Genoa EPYC 9004 series exhibits the highest adaptability, suitable for a wide range of general-purpose servers and data centers, offering up to 96 cores and 192 threads, 384MB of L3 cache, and a 4.4GHz boost frequency.
The Genoa-X EPYC 9004X series adds AMD's unique 3D V-Cache stacked cache, making it the world's first data center processor to adopt 3D chip stacking technology, with a maximum capacity of up to 768MB, combined with the original cache for a total of up to 1254MB, catering to demanding computational workloads.
The Bergamo EPYC 9704 series introduces a compact version of the Zen 4c architecture for enhanced energy efficiency, featuring an industry-leading 128 cores and 256 threads, ideal for ultra-high compute density requirements in cloud-native environments.
The Siena EPYC 8004 series, also based on the Zen 4c architecture, targets infrastructure and intelligent edge computing domains.
In today's AI era, EPYC, despite not matching the computational power of GPU accelerators, still holds an unshakable position as the "neural hub" at the core of platforms. On one hand, it serves as the central nervous system, while on the other hand, it possesses formidable general-purpose computing capabilities. It can collaborate with GPU accelerators, AI accelerators, and others to maximize efficiency.
It's this robust vitality that propels AMD EPYC to skyrocket in the market, garnering more and more market share. With Zen 5 on the horizon, the future looks even more promising.
