The global server market has grown significantly even during the Covid 19 pandemic. According to an International Data Corporation (IDC) estimate, server processors generated €18.5 billion ($22.6 billion) in revenue worldwide in the third quarter of 2020. This corresponds to a growth of 2.2 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year. AMD and ARM in particular benefited from this, as they were able to expand their market shares. Intel, on the other hand, lost market share.
93 percent of the market ($21 billion) is accounted for by AMD (Epyc) and Intel (predominantly Xeon). The remaining 7 percent is distributed between IBM systems (Power processors) and Z-mainframes as well as ARM servers.
112.4 Increase in sales at AMD
According to the IDC Report AMD was able to increase the revenue generated with Epyc processors by 112.4 percent within one year. These figures are also confirmed by the last quarterly report, in which AMD stated that the divisions Enterprise, semi-custom and embedded doubled their sales to $1.13 billion. However, this also includes the console processors for the new Xbox Series X and Playstation as well as the Instinct GPU accelerators.
Concrete Data IDC does not give any figures on the market breakdown for server processors. According to an analysis by Mercury Research from November, AMD was able to achieve a share of 12.1 percent in the comparison between Epyc and Intel Xeon.
ARM also with growth
IDC estimates that ARM has increased revenue by more than 430 percent within the last 12 months. However, due to the low starting point, the company's overall share of the server market is still relatively small.
The main drivers of the growth in ARM processors are Amazon Web Services (ARM), which uses the self-developed ARM processors Graviton and Graviton2. Compared to comparable x86 processors from Intel or AMD, the EC2 instances of the Open Cloud can be operated more cheaply this way. In the future, the photo service Flickr also wants to run all cloud services that do not require a GPU on Graviton machines.
According to an analysis by Jefferies 10 percent of all AWS instances were already running on Graviton processors in the third quarter of 2020. AMD was in the Amazon Cloud represented with 20 percent.
