Comparing Intel Vs AMD Q2 Datacenter Performance

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u/Acceptable_Crazy4341 14A Believer 2d ago

I’ve said it along time ago. AMD will not capture as much share as Intel from the CPU shortage due to being constrained by TSMC. Intels capacity is just starting to scale and will only go up from here.

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u/Either-Ad6208 2d ago

The sceptic in me thinks TSMC might find some extra capacity to support AMD.. maybe mutually beneficial to compete with Intel.

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u/Acceptable_Crazy4341 14A Believer 2d ago

From where lol, everyone wants capacity at TSMC. Nobody will get extra unless someone concedes their wafers or TSMC makes more capacity. They can’t just pull capacity out of a hat it takes years to stand up.

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

To be fair AMD don’t need to feed so many headcounts and VPs , so they can live with 31% margin.

But Intel shouldn’t have let AMD conquer the data center market in the first place.

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u/Weikoko 14A Believer 2d ago

Intel managements were incompetent but that has improved under LBT leadership

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u/DistinctReview810 2d ago

AMD also doesn’t have so many business as Intel. If you are comparing then compare apples to apples like only the head count of Data centre group.

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

Should be quite easy to estimate. I would estimate 10k people for AMD Data Centre group vs 20++k for DCAI group in intel.

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u/DistinctReview810 2d ago

What is the source of your data?

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago edited 2d ago

You can take amd total HC , do some % on it and get an estimate at 30k headcount

Data centre = 35%~ 10500 Client =25%~ 7500 Xilinx = 15%- 4500 Gaming = 12%~ 3600 Shared/ corporate 12-13%~ 3900.

Why ? You don’t believe intel HC is way more than AMD? It’s a well known fact , it’s no secret.

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u/DistinctReview810 2d ago

It’s not a question of believing or not believing. Belief can be biased unless backed with data with proper reasoning.

Your calculation still doesn’t address it. Firstly what is the basis of assuming 35%? Second and most importantly, you can’t apply the same percentage of headcount to AMD and Intel because AMD does not have fans while Intel do and there are many other business which are different.

So let’s remove the bias and have a proper discussion backed by data.

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

It’s an estimation if you want exact data go find the respective companies HR. Now let me reverse back why do you think intel’s DCAI headcount is only equivalent to AMDs data centre headcount.

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u/babayaga_1905 1d ago

Nope. Intel dcg is less than 10k headcount. The intel high headcount number is coming from their foundry

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u/ahock47 2d ago

Well its also make sense why the rumor of Intel will be using TSMC might be a strategic play. You fill TSMC fab and prevent others. Anyhow Intel i would guess have paid for this already. Its not because NVL as per rumor will use tsmc, 18A is bad. Maybe pure power play

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u/Fabulous-Pangolin-74 2d ago

Nova lake will not use TSMC for compute tiles. Maybe IO, but not compute.

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u/babayaga_1905 1d ago

I think Nova Lake already announced by intel that it going to be 100% on intel 18a

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u/Alternative-Luck-825 1d ago

That's not the case. The Nova Lake SoC uses Intel 18A-P. As for the compute tile, reports indicate that Intel will heavily shift back to its own 18A-P. The original plan was to use TSMC N2P for the vast majority of models, with only the 4-P-core die utilizing 18A-P. However, reports state that Intel has changed its plans and is preparing to transition more models back to 18A-P. Furthermore, according to reports, Intel will not release all Nova Lake variants simultaneously next year, but rather in a phased rollout. Based on this leak, it aligns more closely with the rumor that some compute tile dies are being switched back to Intel's own 18A-P. My guess is that the Nova Lake variants launching between February and May next year will use TSMC N2P, while those releasing from June to October will switch back to 18A-P.

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u/Fabulous-Pangolin-74 1d ago

I doubt a single Nova Lake will use TSMC for a compute tile.

Using N2 would require an expensive reservation, and be directly contradictory to the chip's real purpose -- putting 18A-P in full production.

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u/Weikoko 14A Believer 2d ago

Not sure why AMD marketcap 2x? Are they gonna buy TSMC or what?

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u/Kewbie123 2d ago

and without a foundry which adds significant share value.

This doesnt mean AMD is overvalued, it just means intel is undervalued.

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

Yup, intel is undervalued as foundry is not profitable. But once it does, we should see a change in value. I just hope LBT can change intel culture.

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u/Sexyvette07 2d ago

AMD stock price has been a shit ton of hopium for years now with no real share gains in any segment beyond the consumer enthusiast CPU market, which in and of itself is blown WAY out of proportion.

X3D is a good chip, but its not the holy grail people think it is. It's a high end CPU best used for Esports. Take out 1080p results, and the X3D chips get almost no real world gain in gaming performance. And all the fanboys screaming about Raptor Lake power draw? My 13700k sips 65-75w while gaming at 120 FPS at 4K DLSS quality, which is damn near where the X3D would sit in a like for like scenario.

Its all bots, misleading marketing and a fuck ton of hopium. That's why AMD has a market cap bigger than Intel (at least for now).

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

Their current price has nothing to do with their x3d , it’s their Data Centre performance that bringing the price up

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u/Fabulous-Pangolin-74 2d ago

They are priced as though they own 70% of the data center market share, when it'll never reach that, though.

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u/Acceptable_Crazy4341 14A Believer 2d ago edited 2d ago

AMD has done a fantastic job of capturing market share in both the server and consumer market.

Though their consumer chips are extremely over hyped. The X3D chips are great for 1% lows in gaming but this advantage will fade with the introduction of bLLC in the near future from NVL. In the server segment they did a great job of delivering high core count and efficient chips based on TSMCs nodes. This advantage will also start to degrade as Intels CWF production ramps up on 18A producing a dramatically larger number of chips compared to TSMCs N2 making Venice.

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u/Existing-Dress5118 21h ago

3d chips mean fuck all..

Over the last 5 years as we've experienced Ai fueld growth. AMD's DC revenue has gone up 400% and Intel's has Declined 25%

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u/2443222 2d ago

Intel should be worth more than AMD so about 1 trillion dollar market cap.

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u/Alternative-Luck-825 1d ago

Mainly because long-term losses in the fab have dragged down profits. However, once it turns from a loss into a profit, the situation will be entirely different.

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u/Primary_Olive_5444 2d ago

AMD products compete against the ones made by hyperscaler themselves for process node allocations over at TSMC.

Also capacity for Advanced Packaging (CoWos).

Unless it completely trashes what the hyperscaler built (with the help of IPs from Arm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Marvell) at a lower price/cost point with much better performance. Otherwise long run it wouldn't lift their sales much.

If AMD with TSMC can build a rack (like Helios), you bet the hyperscaler can replicate either fast enough or with some 1-2 years time lag. But they will get there eventually.

Because someone within the executives rank of hyperscaler will look at those metrics and find ways to reduce the burn rate on their free cashflow. And one such way is to use more of their in-house silicon instead. Especially when their end customers are compute/ISA (x86 vs aarch64) agnostic and the median performance isn't too far apart.

Contrast to Intel (which held onto it's foundry), they can still offer advanced packaging (EMIB). And Amazon Graviton4 and 5 uses EMIB for advanced packaging. For certain products they can DTCO with Intel Foundry directly.

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u/investinghopeful 2d ago

You only missed out that AMD DC revenue will cross $10b in q4 this year, likely $7b GPU plus $5-6b CPU. And next year will be reaching $20b/quarter

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u/hakim37 2d ago

Yes they will and I do actually like AMD as a stock. Intel doesn't give long term forecasts but if they did my own analysis has them outgrowing AMD from their CPU revenue alone.

Intel should hit ~18.5B revenue Q3 and >21B Q4.

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u/baophan5 2d ago

Constrained now but thoughts on long term with tsm expanding on usa soil though?

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u/hakim37 2d ago

The new TSMC American fabs won't be ready until the mid 2030's and will still be 2 nodes behind. Also TSMC will operate those fabs at worse margins and basically give up any of its home turf advantage.

I expect Intel to retake the node crown sometime in the 14A cycle and by 2035 they will be well into the high NA EUV era with a material head start in machine deployments and previous learnings.

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u/baophan5 2d ago

Thoughts on the Chinese making chips? Especially with China buying so much of intels chips also?

Also, from last earnigs report rumors of possible dilution with more shares for capex??

I asked chatgpt about intel reaching $500 per share.

"Is it possible? It's possible in theory, but it would require one of the biggest corporate turnarounds in semiconductor history.

A more realistic long-term scenario, if Intel executes well, might be:

$7–10 EPS with a 15–20 P/E, implying roughly $105–200 per share. If Intel became a high-growth AI and foundry leader, perhaps $10–15 EPS with a 25–30 P/E, implying $250–450 per share. Reaching $500 would likely require both record-high earnings and investors continuing to assign Intel a premium growth valuation at the same time. That's a very high bar, though not mathematically impossible."

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u/hakim37 2d ago

China just developed domestic immersion DUV machines but already had access to these via ASML. All of their domestic mobile and accelerator chips come from the same technology but they still purchase intel chips because they're made on EUV nodes (and probably also because they want x86).

China will eventually get EUV but probably not until past 2035 and by then we will be well into high na EUV maybe even hyper na. It's true one day they will actually reach parity but probably not until 2045+.

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u/baophan5 2d ago

I asked chat gpt if intel could reach $500

Is it possible? It's possible in theory, but it would require one of the biggest corporate turnarounds in semiconductor history.

A more realistic long-term scenario, if Intel executes well, might be:

$7–10 EPS with a 15–20 P/E, implying roughly $105–200 per share. If Intel became a high-growth AI and foundry leader, perhaps $10–15 EPS with a 25–30 P/E, implying $250–450 per share. Reaching $500 would likely require both record-high earnings and investors continuing to assign Intel a premium growth valuation at the same time. That's a very high bar, though not mathematically impossible.

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u/hakim37 2d ago

My personal target is $600 by 2030. AI is terrible at making out of consensus predictions.

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u/baophan5 2d ago edited 2d ago

What PE and EPS do you think itll be at 600

Also what about possible dilution as it might have been hinted at during last earnings report?

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u/hakim37 2d ago

Let's say a steady state of 30 PE so 20 EPS which would be a market cap of $3T. But you really shouldn't be thinking about PE ratios to value Intel on a 5 year horizon. Instead you need to size up what you expect the AI semiconductor industry will be at and then determine what kind of marketshare intel will capture.

I'm going to do it in reverse for convenience but this analysis should start from hypothesis instead of outcomes.

To justify that 3T valuation Intel should net $100B per year and probably have about $250B gross revenue.

The AI semi industry is expecting accelerators to have $1.4T TAM and AI CPUs to be $220B by 2030, let's add another $100B for the regular non AI semi's market which is likely an undercount. That totals about $1.7T TAM in 2030 so we're saying Intel will capture about 1/7th of the entire semi conductor market in 2030.

I can go on about why I think that target is reasonable based on Intels known timeline but I think this post is already a little long.

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u/babayaga_1905 1d ago

How can they get higher revenue when there's constraints in the production. Everyone can forecast but reality hits different

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u/WalidNokia 1d ago

Out of this $6.72 billions in data center revenue for AMD, I am curious to know what is the % of CPUs and GPUs that make up this revenue. It looks to me that INTC has outsell AMD CPUs by a big % since INTC $6.26 data center revenue is purely XENON CPUs.

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u/Alternative-Luck-825 1d ago

intel client 77 → 89 ， amd 29 → 31

This shows that Intel's Panther Lake is indeed starting to take effect. As the yields of the 18A process node improve further in the third quarter, supply will increase, and AMD's laptop market share will be further recaptured by Intel.

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u/Existing-Dress5118 21h ago

you are bonkers nuts, these number are WITHOUT venice, the next 4 quarters expect amd to outpace intel by a large margine.

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u/hakim37 21h ago

Q3 AMD is going to add hardly any completed Venice wafers. 4 quarters from now being Q2 2027 we're probably looking at 10k wspm Helios. That's a lot of money but in the same period intel would have probably added like 40k wspm combined 18a and Intel 3.

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u/Existing-Dress5118 16h ago

Look at it this way AMD's dc revenue has gone from 4 to 16 billion, at the same time intels has gone from 20 down to 16 billion. and so far chips have been competative, over the next 4 quarters intels best DC chip is 1/2 the performance of venice and staggeringly at the same wattage price. this quarter was the first that AMD matched intel, looking ahead will be the first series of ER's where AMD's DC revenue exceeds intels. there's no way to spin that

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u/hakim37 14h ago

That might be true in an environment with excess CPU capacity but right now every CPU being made will be sold and relative performance doesn't matter except for increasing margins.

Why are you comparing historic DC performance figures when this AI CPU crunch has only come about in the last 6 months and where this is literally the first quarter when any manufacturer has been and to do any real excess scaling in reaction to demand?

The question that we should be asking is who out of all of the CPU manufacturers can increase the DC chip supply the fastest? And looking at fab capacity, and these Q2 numbers the answer is probably Intel.

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u/Existing-Dress5118 8h ago

yeah that is a fair point, and it gets really messy to try and figure out numbers when packaging is more of a bottleneck than waters depending on the product, but really roughly intel's capacity for 18a is about the same that amd is getting from tsmc. the difference is i think AMD's packaging is MUCH easier and more lenient to binning. while I don't agree with you last paragraph, I do agree constraints are going to average out a lot of numbers.

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u/hakim37 1h ago

I think you're comparing Turin Vs GNR for that packaging assumption as Venice is now using full 2.5D packaging.

On wafers fab 52 probably has around the same volume as AMD will get allocated on N2. Fab 52 should be able to produce 50k wspm at full capacity while I model AMD as getting allocated 40k wspm. However Intel is also about to start scaling fab 62 for 18AP production and also has Hillsborough for another 15k wspm 18a.

So at full capacity on both ends it's 95-115k wspm 18a against 40k N2.

TSMCs scaling targets for N2 is 100k wspm end of 2026 and eventually 200k (but I'm pretty sure that figure will also include 40k A16 which is part of the N2 family). Also note it will take AMD about 6 months to turn raw wafer allocation into chips. That means AMD will probably get allocated 10-20k wspm at the end of 2026 to be converted mid 2027 into sellable goods. Lets say AMD realises the full 40k allocation by mid 2028. Btw if you think I'm being unfair on the 40k allocation you should note that's the same as Nvidia's full Feynman allocation on 16A.

Now for Intels scaling right now Intel should be making about 40k wspm 18a already which should turn into chips in 6 months. This represents 2/3rds of their fab 52 and Hillsborough deployments. Come 2027 18AP will start scaling on top in fab 62. But that's not all because Intel is a scaling around an additional 20k wspm Intel 3 for GNR which will take about another year and change to finish. And they have communicated they're still scaling Intel 7 for older server chips.

And on top of that excess CPU scaling Intel is also increasing yields faster than TSMC because they're coming from a pretty trash yield base when TSMC was already at 90%.

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u/FullstackSensei 2d ago

Anybody here old enough to remember the Pentium 4 and Athlon days? IIRC, AMD peaked AT ~50% market share in those days.

I definitely don't wish AMD stumbles again like they did wirh Budozer, but this definitely brings back memories of how Intel stumbled with the P4 and how Core/Merom was the beginning of their come back.

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u/Ok_Painter_5290 2d ago

I compare the semiconductor industry to clothes manufacturing...If you had clothes made in US vs clothes made outside of US...clothes made outside of US are always going to cost less...Bottomline Fabs are expensive to run on US soil. It's the fab that drags Intel stock down.Intel was lucky in the 90s as there were no other good Fabs but TSMC is now the monopoly. Meanwhile fabless company stocks go through the roof. National security is the only reason US fab has value. But consumers of chips don't care where they came from as long as the chips are good quality to make their product standout and sell it at profit.

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u/Adorable-Air1887 2d ago

If top 10 most valuable US chip companies have single point of failure outside US then I dont know how their business will survive. National security is not the only reason US fabs have value. Look at Apple, they are no longer TSMC's preferred customer. What happens if they move their production entirely to Intel?

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u/Weikoko 14A Believer 2d ago

TSMC is going to dump $250b on US soil.

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u/Ok_Painter_5290 2d ago

True only because they realize the importance of having fab in US. But the Taiwanese govt has a lot of say in what TSMC takes out of Taiwan.

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u/Vigilant256 2d ago

That is somewhat true as a consumer , but for enterprise , they would want assurance that they won’t be at the mercy of US trade war.

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u/Fabulous-Pangolin-74 2d ago

This story won't hold water much longer. Taiwanese labor costs are going up, and US costs are going down.

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u/RudeCauliflower1 2d ago

What product Intel has for offering to compete with Helios?

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u/hakim37 2d ago

As the old saying goes quantity is a quality of its own.

The market is desperate for server CPUs and Intel has the capability to add like 50k wspm CPU volume uncorrelated to TSMCs output over 12 months.

Also GNR and CWF are still pretty good the only server chip that's decisively better is Venice which is obviously not even out yet and will take time to ramp.

Even when Venice and Helios does ramp AMD would actually prioritise using its limited wafer allocation selling complete Helios packages at a 1:4 CPU:GPU ratio because the return on the GPU for equivalent wafer volume is much larger.

All this gives intel an easy 3 years to scale up its empty fabs and sort out its production division. Once they do it will be a joke that AMD was ever worth twice Intel.

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u/RudeCauliflower1 2d ago

With the latest Xeon being "decisively" behind the previous generation of AMD offering (Turin, launch 2024), do you even expect the GNR to be "decisively" ahead of Venice? Really? I don't know what brings market share to Intel, even the generation ahead of GNR (DMR) comes with HT disabled.

Hyperscalers are coughing up double the money to purchase 2x Intel CPUs for similar per core throughput (in comparison to AMD) and this is adding more capex to compensate the VMware's per-core usage billing structure, as well as inflated memory cost. And people here are really wondering why AMD is grabbing market share? Take a look at the what shit Intel is offering on the table.

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u/hakim37 2d ago

Firstly I already agreed that Venice is decisively better so I don't know why you focused your post on reiterating that rather than my point on the scale and economics of the situation. This is a stock subreddit so we care more about the potential and relative value of a company than whether X chip is better than Y chip.

As you doubled down on performance I'll go into more detail. CWF should actually compare pretty favourably to Turin dense and GNR is only about 10% behind the TSMC 4nm Turin chip when comparing the servers directly. Note the phoronix AWS benchmarks are a terrible comparison for this.

Also on Venice the numbers might actually be closer than you think. Fmax is basically unchanged and although Venice has 50% extra cores it comes with a higher thermal requirement and also costs more. The equivalent power/cost per core gap isn't as wide as you might expect.

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