Wasn't Granite Rapids priced too high, anyway? I got the feeling Intel tried to return to their normal pricing after the post-pandemic scorched-earth competitive pricing and customer retention strategy set in motion by Gelsinger, and the market just didn't respond. Likely also due to continued strong competition from EPYC and AMD's relentless roadmap execution overall (it is all about roadmaps in server, remember).
From reading some Nvidia stock touting analysis, I've concluded that the expectation that AMD Instinct sales growth will stall in Q1 is based on the presumption that Nvidia's Blackwell generation will pretty much eliminate competition, immediately. However, as for any product, I would think it will take time for it to ramp, and it will remain expensive, until it is in turn replaced by its successor. So for Q1, and all of 2025, I would expect that AMD will continue to have plenty of Hopper generation volume to compete against.
With MI325X and ROCm improvements, I would think close partners like Microsoft and Meta, who already have seen great results, will continue to scale up their deployments. Considering that they started working with AMD on the initial Instinct products years ago, they are clearly motivated by more than just leading edge performance. |
