AMD recently made an announcement about their recent SeaMicro win for Verizon’s Cloud Data Centers. We all know that AMD has been struggling quite a bit in terms of their enterprise CPU division with AMD Opterons, however, AMD’s purchase of SeaMicro clearly changed the dynamic. SeaMicro was a company that sold both AMD and Intel CPUs (and still does) with it’s own network fabric, which is supposed to give it a unique advantage over it’s competitors. When AMD snapped up SeaMicro, Intel went on a spending binge making sure that they bought up all of the necessary IP so that they wouldn’t get locked out of a company as successful as SeaMicro. They even badmouthed the deal, but it was ultimately verified that Intel was scared by the hundreds of millions they spent to secure network fabric IP from other players.
Now, the Verizon Cloud Data Center win for AMD is a pretty important one for the company as it signifies the fact that AMD’s SeaMicro division is capable of making significant design wins with AMD’s own hardware. AMD’s announcement only a few days ago was designed to show that AMD and SeaMicro are capable of getting significant customers onboard and making them happy enterprise customers. This was achieved with the creation of the SM15000 and a solution that focused on both companies’ strengths.
We spoke to some individuals close to the matter and were able to get a detailed explanation about how AMD got the design win and some details about the deal. One of the biggest misconceptions about the Verizon deal that was perpetuated by some publications was that this Verizon deal was actually a huge win for Intel. This is based on the assumption that since Verizon is currently in possession of Intel SeaMicro systems and those systems outnumber AMD’s own SM15000. If you read the article yourself, you can see the incredible amount of Intel bias within the article and see how heavy handed it is towards AMD.
The truth, from what we’ve been told, is that this win for AMD has actually been in development prior to AMD even planning to acquire SeaMicro. AMD acquired SeaMicro around a year and a half ago and this deal has been in the works for over 2 1/2 years. So, considering those factors it’s no surprise that Verizon would probably have bought some Intel systems prior to the AMD acquisition. After all, even to this day, AMD still sells SeaMicro systems with Intel CPUs inside of them to keep customers happy. And while it may seem ironic (and it is), they are doing what’s right for their customers and what keeps the company profitable. After all, if they’re going to be making a lot of margin on SeaMicro systems, why not sell Intel CPUs too if that’s what some of their customers want until AMD offers them a comparable solution?
From the indications we’ve got, Verizon has actually committed themselves to the SM15000 servers as the primary choice for their new cloud solution. Since these things take time to deploy, it will obviously take some time for AMD and SeaMicro to deliver these systems to Verizon. However, Verizon’s plans for the present and future are all about SeaMicro’s SM15000, which was why it was so prominently featured in the AMD PR about the partnership between the companies.
What I find most amusing is the fact that Intel even bothered to call in some of their pro-Intel media to write this FUD piece. The real truth is that there is no story here and that Intel is clearly afraid of what AMD could do to them if they keep working closely with customers and making a crucial design wins like this one. If the verbiage of the ExtremeTech article is any indication, using things like “utterly destroyed” is accurate at all, why is Intel even bothering with AMD? Aren’t they supposed to essentially own the market? Why would the market leader be spreading FUD about a supposedly insignificant competitor, that is unless they’re afraid.
The truth is, this is a good design win for AMD and god knows they need the sales and the money. When AMD is competitive on all fronts, the entire industry is better. If they push Intel on desktop and servers, consumers and the enterprise get better products for less money. The same goes in the GPU business with AMD and Nvidia, with a competitive AMD, Nvidia is forced to put out better products for less money. A competitive AMD moves the industry forward and we’re really hopeful this is just the beginning because we can’t wait to see what they make their competitors do as a result of their own competitive products.
Original Author: Anshel Sag
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