There is momentum in the computing industry. The laptops and pre-assembled desktops being sold today are based on the OEM decisions that were made 1-2 years ago. Most corporate client computing machines are on a similar timeline. IT departments don't want to support a wide variety of hardware, so they standardize on a single model or variations within that model for years.
Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more.
I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon.
So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.
Exactly right. AMD has not only been telling their big customers about it -- they've been letting their customers test it. Google has been testing Rome for months, and have decided to move forward with a full-scale deployment, not only for their own data centers, but for their public cloud. They are using Rome in their production servers today.
Like it or not, Google's stamp of approval carries a tremendous weight in this industry. And if that's not good enough for you, Microsoft and AWS are stepping up their deployments of EPYC as well.
As a result, a lot of smaller companies will now require a much lower standard of due diligence when approving an EPYC Rome deployment.
Not only that but the Ryzen 3 3300U and friends are Zen+ and not Zen 2. It won't be until next year when the IT department even can buy a Zen 2 U laptop.
The signs are there, Lenovo has called them T480 and A480 last year, T490 and T495 this year, indicating these are very close.
Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more.
I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon.
So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.