History of the server
Server and the cloud
Fast-forward to 2022, the market for server processors is getting bigger, more crowded and more complex. Intel brings in 33% of its revenues from server chips, up from 29% in 2016.
Data centres now account for 39% of the sales of Nvidia, up from 7% six years ago.
For AMD, another American chip designer, the figure has jumped from 17% to 23% between 2020 and 2021.
Why so much competition?
Two factors explain the competitive storm; the first is the market size and growth.
Where sales of PCs and smartphones, and the chips inside them, are expected to fall this year, server demand is forecast to rise. Synergy Research Group, a firm of analysts, expects the cloud giants to build more than 300 new data centres around the world by 2024.
The second reason for the upheaval is the growing sophistication of what the cloud does. It doesn’t just act as an external hard drive. It is bursting with new capabilities that require different chip architectures. In some cases, it means repurposing the existing tech. For example, Nvidia’s cloud business is built atop its graphics processing units (GPUs), specialised chips used to make computer animation lifelike. It turns out that GPUs, which were first designed in the 1990s to improve video games, are also excellent at running artificial intelligence models.
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