> AMD is fabless, so they are in competition with other GF and TSMC customers for manufacturing capacity.
That also means that they don't have all the fab expenses that Intel does.
That also means that they don't have all the fab expenses that Intel does.
I'm almost certain that in AMD takes every sale from Intel when they can deliver. They have superior product but not enough capacity to reap all the benefits from their success.
Only if Intel is also _perceived_ as the inferior product. Remember that the value to the customer goes beyond raw benchmarking specs; it also includes brand reputation and marketing.
At the level of truly huge purposes, "value" also encompasses a real bilateral relationship between the company and vendor. A cloud provider might be tempted to stay with Intel now over AMD if by doing so they preserve guaranteed access/preferential pricing over the next set of server chips. To crack that hypothetical relationship, AMD would have to both dominate now and be perceived to dominate for the medium-term future.
It's only the retail market that can be so fickle as to consider a CPU a one-off purchase.
Sure they do. That's where the saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" comes from. If anything enterprise is more brand sensitive and less price sensitive than retail customers.
Not to mention there is the entire surrounding ecosystem from the CPU parts themselves. The chipsets, boards, laptop availabiilty. Not to mention things like vendor lock in to the particular out of band management technology. Getting better benchmark scores and saving a few hundred per CPU is only part of a much larger matrix for making a purchasing decision.
Data center customers care about specs and prices only. They study the products they buy.
Data center customers care about support, vendor relationships, keeping complexity down, politics, reliability (= aversion to new products), lots of things. If anything the custom PC market is more focused around specs and prices solely.
Enterprise if anything has more inertia than say the custom PC market which will turn on a dime to chase the best deals.
Except they don't? There's a reason Intel's flagship HEDT part, the i9-10980XE, is half the price of the part its replacing despite almost nothing changing about the chip itself. And at the same time AMD is raising the price of its HEDT parts.
And it's not just the HEDT parts, but Intel also cut the prices on a bunch of Xeon chips a month or two ago as well, as well as their consumer stack.
...or that Intel controls supply to retail vendors by other means. If a vendor is bound to keep putting Intel products on their stores to comply with supply agreements made in the past, for example.