It has been a busy week for AMD, so without further delay let’s get into the news…
A small-scale EPYC
A big part of AMD’s recent first quarter success story is its growing strength in the enterprise CPU market. During the Q1 earnings call, AMD CEO LIsa Su touted the company’s “significant enterprise momentum” getting its EPYC CPUs into enterprise server platforms.
Su did not say much about how AMD is addressing customers that don’t fit the big enterprise profile, but this week it’s telling an EPYC story on a smaller scale, as it aims for small and medium businesses and hosted IT service providers as well with the launch of a broad line of smaller-footprint, budget-friendly EPYC 4005 Series CPUs.
Dennis McQueen, the product marketing manager for server solutions at AMD, admitted during a briefing that AMD has not had EPYC processors that were packaged and priced correctly for this part of the market. “We knew that we were not serving the SMB and dedicated hoster space very well,” he said.
The company is rectifying that with three 16-core processors with I/O at up to 28 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 that range in price from $549 to $699, as well as 6-core, 8-core and 12-core devices that fall into a cheaper range. These processors follow the company’s initial 4004 Series for these market targets, and use the same widely deployed AM5 socket used for the AMD EPYC 4004 Series CPUs, but the 4005 leverages AMD’s fifth-generation Zen 5 core technology that the company announced last year.
McQueen pointed out that AMD’s prices for its new 16-core processors compare favorably against Intel 6300 processors that weigh in at eight cores, so “you are getting huge performance per dollar.”
McQueen said the 4005 Series has the performance potential to satisfy not just general purpose workloads, but also “AI-enhanced workloads,” which he described as something like Microsoft Office, which now has the company’s Copilot AI assistant included. “They [SMBs and other customers] have been running these workloads for years and they now have AI enhanced in there,” he said, adding “Whether or not these companies want to embrace AI it’s going to be there, so you need a platform that can run it.”
Other workloads targeted by the 4005 Series included hosting, computer vision and video analytics applications, e-commerce, and more.
AMD’s partners applauded the news. “We’re excited to expand our portfolio with systems powered by AMD EPYC 4005 Series processors, bringing new levels of value to customers seeking efficient, cost-optimized performance,” said Vik Malyala, President & Managing Director EMEA, SVP, Technology & AI, Supermicro in a statement provided by AMD. “From our 3U MicroCloud multi-node platforms to our 1U and 2U mainstream server families, these solutions offer a compelling mix of performance, power efficiency, and deployment flexibility. With support for technologies like PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory, we’re enabling IT administrators to deliver more services at lower latency.”
A much bigger deal
AMD’s push into the smaller business end of the market with the Epyc 4005 Series came the same week as it engaged in a much bigger deal, a $10 billion global-scale AI infrastructure collaboration with HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s new AI enterprise.
The announcement came as President Donald Trump was visiting Saudi Arabia on the first international trip of the current administration, and was part of a coordinated series of announcements involving several US and Saudi Arabian companies and billions of dollars of new investment in AI data centers and chips in Saudi Arabia, the US, and elsewhere. For example, Nvidia announced its own chip deal with HUMAIN.
Regarding AMD’s agreement with HUMAIN, the pair plan to put the $10-billion investment into building out 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years, with a plan to “activate multi-exaflop capacity” by early next year, according to a statement.
And a big stock buy-back
All of the above happened before AMD announced a $6 billion share repurchase program, expanding on a previously announced $4 billion buy-back move to bring the total repurchase program to $10 billion. The announcement arrived as AMD convened its annual meeting of shareholders Wednesday. There is no time like the present for AMD to make a bigger bet on itself. After getting beaten up for multiple quarters for not being Nvidia, AMD is on a roll with a robust Q1 earnings report recently behind it.