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Comment by Majromax | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that Intel sells inferior product at higher price means that AMD has supply bottleneck.

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.

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Enterprise customers don't care about brands. Retail customers are insignificant.

> Enterprise customers don't care about brands.

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.

Enterprise customers may care about brands at the level of Dell or Apple.

Data center customers care about specs and prices only. They study the products they buy.

Due to the needs to reduce complexity and have less vendors to deal with most companies use a limited amount of suppliers for datacenter equipment as well like Dell or HPE or whatever.

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.

Yes they absolutely do and AMD vs Intel is more than a matter of branding. It's fundamentally switching vendors. If something goes wrong it's on the head of the person who pushed for the change. There's also some things you can't do seamlessly between two servers that don't have a processor from the same brand.

Enterprise if anything has more inertia than say the custom PC market which will turn on a dime to chase the best deals.

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