A 3D printed Facebook’s new rebrand logo Meta and Facebook logo are placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Nov 8 (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) on Monday said 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 range of new chips aimed at taking on larger rivals such as Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) in supercomputing markets, as well as smaller competitors including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.
After years of trailing the much larger Intel in the market for x86 processor chips, AMD has steadily gained market share since 2017, when a comeback plan spearheaded by Chief Executive Lisa Su put the company on a course to its present position of having faster chips than Intel.
AMD now has nearly a quarter of the market for x86 chips, according to Mercury Research.
After securing Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, as a customer, AMD now has deals in place with many of Intel’s largest customers. It also has deals with Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google Cloud, Amazon.com’s (AMZN.O) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) Azure.
But AMD on Monday 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 like machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The new AMD chip is designed to take on Nvidia’s A100 chip, which, along with other chips designed to speed up artificial intelligence, has helped make Nvidia the most valuable U.S.-listed semiconductor company.
AMD said that Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will use the new chip in its “Frontier” supercomputing system.
AMD also took aim at smaller rivals. The company announced a new central processor called “Bergamo” that will ship in the first half of 2023. The “Bergamo” chip will have 128 computing cores, which are useful for cloud computing companies that rent out their chips on a core-by-core basis to outside customers.
Ampere Computing, a startup founded by former Intel executives, is pursuing a similar high-core-count strategy and this year signed up Oracle Corp’s (ORCL.N) cloud service as a customer.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Mark Porter and Keith Weir
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