AMD lands Meta as a customer, aims at Nvidia with new pieces
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/DWAYGUHTPBNHJNJKSJK4HY7E24.jpg "AMD lands Meta as a customer, aims at Nvidia with new pieces")
A 3D-printed Facebook’s new rebrand logo Meta and Facebook logo are placed on a laptop keyboard in this illustration taken November 2, 2021. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic / Illustration / File Photo
November 8 (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) said Monday that it has won Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) as a data center chip customer, cementing some of its gains against Intel Corp (INTC.O).
It also announced a number of new chips aimed at taking on bigger rivals such as Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) in supercomputer markets, as well as smaller competitors including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.
After years of following the much larger Intel in the x86 processor chip market, AMD has steadily gained market share since 2017, when a comeback plan led by CEO Lisa Su set the company on course for its current position of having faster chips than Intel.
AMD now has nearly a quarter of the x86 chip market, according to Mercury Research.
After securing Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, as a customer, AMD now has agreements in place with many of Intel’s largest customers. It also has agreements with Alphabet Incs (GOOGL.O) Google Cloud, Amazon.com (AMZN.O) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corps (MSFT.O) Azure.
But on Monday, AMD also announced plans to take on rivals beyond Intel. The company announced a chip called the MI200 which is an “accelerator” designed to speed up certain tasks such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The new AMD chip is designed to take on Nvidia’s A100 chip, which together with other chips designed to increase the speed of artificial intelligence, has helped make Nvidia the most valuable US-listed semiconductor company.
AMD said that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will use the new chip in its “Frontier” supercomputer processing system.
AMD also aimed at smaller rivals. The company announced a new central processor called “Bergamo” that will be shipped in the first half of 2023. The “Bergamo” chip will have 128 data cores, which are useful for cloud computing companies that rent out their chips on a core-to-core basis to external customers.
Ampere Computing, a startup founded by former Intel executives, follows a similar high-core strategy and this year has registered Oracle Corps (ORCL.N) cloud service as a customer.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Edited by Mark Porter and Keith Weir
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