Intel admitted that it is forced to reduce server processor prices due to competition with AMD

The discussion of the situation in the server segment at Intel's quarterly reporting event boiled down to management's attempts to warn investors against jumping to conclusions, as revenue and operating profit in this line of business fell in the second quarter. Regarding the delayed announcement of Sapphire Rapids, it was said that it was not caused by technology issues.

In general, during the whole event Intel was trying in every way to demonstrate that it's all right with 10nm technology. Ice Lake-SP server processors are quickly gaining popularity with their target customers. In the second half of the year Intel expects to increase server revenue by double-digit percent sequentially. Company executives had to explain that the 7 % decrease in the average selling price of server processors is mainly due to increased competition. In other words, AMD EPYC processors continued to gain popularity, and Intel had to counter this trend with a price reduction for its own products. In the second half of the year, Intel expects to keep not only the prices, but also the market share. With the lack of production capacity on the whole market, Intel has an advantage in the form of the opportunity to produce processors in its own facilities. The company promises to make every effort to regain lost market positions. Intel believes that the server market has passed its bottom in the first quarter, and by the end of the year it will show continuous growth. On the reasons for delaying the announcement of Sapphire Rapids until the next six months, the head of Intel said rather vaguely, but from his words we can conclude that the company's customers needed more time to validate all the changes that the new family brings. DDR5 support and PCI Express 5.0 were mentioned as those new features that take extra time to adapt. The artificial intelligence market, according to Gelsinger, will continue to grow by an average of 20 % annually, and therefore Intel could regain the leading position in all its segments, not excluding the server segment, by 2024. The performance of the Sapphire Rapids samples they have at their disposal, the company's customers are very satisfied, as Intel's head noted.

Intel promised that Ice Lake-SP processors will be faster than 64-core AMD Rome. But AMD is on the way to Milan.

Intel Xeon Scalable processors remain the basis for building HPC and cloud systems for tasks using artificial intelligence. In addition to support for AVX-512, DL Boost and Optane PMem instructions, the new Ice Lake-SPs will be able to offer an increase in the number of executable instructions per clock (IPC) around 18 %. Among other benefits, it allows, according to Intel, its 32-core chips to outperform AMD Rome's 64-core solutions.

Of course, we are talking about specific tasks that take advantage of Intel's instruction sets like AVX-512, but nevertheless. Recall: Ice Lake-SPs will get extended memory bandwidth (8 DDR4-3200 channels, up to 6 Tbytes of RAM per contact pad) and increased performance in the AVX-512. Depending on the task, the new chips will bypass the previous generation of Cascade Lake in popular loads by 1.2–1.6 times. According to Intel, when evaluating the performance of floating point computing in SPECcpu2017 (fp), the increase in new processors is impressive 38 % compared to its predecessors on the Skylake architecture with the same number of cores at the same clock speed.

Anyway, Intel also has to follow the AMD kilwater and increase the number of cores. If previously the company offered a maximum of 28 cores, in Ice Lake-SP company is no longer shy 32 cores with a base frequency of 2.2 GHz and an unknown TDP. And recently there were rumors that the most expensive offers of the family will offer 38 cores with TDP over 200 W.

In this quarter, Intel plans to deliver the first processors to HPC customers, and a full-scale launch will take place in the first quarter of 2021. AMD's opponent by that time will be not the processors of Rome generation, but the next one, Milan. In them, AMD has optimized the cores, cache operation, improved the memory controller, reduced latency in all weak points. And the improved technical process will allow increasing the frequencies. All this may further shift the scale in favor of AMD in the HPC segment, but it will still be very difficult for AMD to fight against Intel's almost monopoly position in this sector.