AMD Hires Intel’s Data Center Head To Steer Blooming Cloud Business

AMD is making strides in provisioning hardware infrastructure for cloud vendors. The company nearly doubled its revenue in the first two quarters of 2021 year-over-year (YoY) and is further charting a growth trajectory by roping in Lynn Comp, a 22 year Intel executive overseeing processor sales for data centers.

Less than two years after American semiconductor giant AMD poached Intel SVP Dan McNamaraOpens a new window , the company has now onboarded yet another Intel executive. AMD on Monday confirmed with CRN that they have hired Intel veteran Lynn CompOpens a new window as a corporate vice president to head its cloud business.

Comp and McNamara are expected to work closely since the former will report directly to the latter. She is tasked with the expansion of AMD’s Cloud Business Group, enabled through the Server Business Unit, whose SVP and GM has been McNamara since January 2020.

AMD’s cloud and data center business is based on EPYC server products, embedded products, and infrastructure. It has done fairly well but has not achieved the heights of bigger domestic rivals, such as Intel. However, it is common knowledge that Intel’s position as a premier data center infra vendor has dwindled over the past few years.

For instance, in Q1 2021, Intel reported a 20% dropOpens a new window in data center revenue (total revenue dropped by 1%). AMD, which also competes with Intel in the personal computer CPU space through its Ryzen series, has possibly benefited from Intel’s revenue decline. As such, the company’s revenue for the same quarter almost doubled (93%) YoY to $3.4 billionOpens a new window .

In Q2 2021, Intel’s total revenue remained stagnantOpens a new window while proceeds from its data center business fell by 9% YoY. In the same time period, AMD’s total revenue surged by 99%Opens a new window .

Intel still serves a bulk of the market, both for personal computing CPUs as well as data centers. However, the company should be concerned about AMD eating away its business, now at an all-time high, not only for CPUs and data center spaces but also in mobile devices.

Overall x86 CPU Share (Includes IoT)	Q2 2021	Q1 2021	QoQ Change	Q2 2020	YoY Change
Intel	77.5%	79.3%	-1.8%	81.7%	-4.2%
AMD	22.5%	20.7%	1.8%	18.3%	4.2%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	0.0%	100.0%	0.0%

 

Overall Data Center Share	Q2 2021	Q1 2021	QoQ Change	Q2 2020	YoY Change
Intel	90.5%	91.1%	-0.6%	94.2%	3.7%
AMD	9.5%	8.9%	0.6%	5.8%	-3.7%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	0.0%	100.0%	0.0%

Intel and AMD Market Share | Data Source: Mercury Research 

See Also: Charlie Bell Calls It Quits After Over 23 Years at AWS, Joins Microsoft

AMD president and CEO Lisa Su said during the Q2 2021 earnings call:

“We are seeing very strong demand across our full server portfolio with second gen EPYC processor revenue growing sequentially and third gen EPYC processor sales more than doubling quarter-over-quarter. Third gen EPYC processor revenue is ramping faster than the prior generation.”

“Cloud demand further accelerated in the quarter, led by growing internal workload adoption and nearly 50 new AMD-powered instances by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, Tencent, and Alibaba. Google announced it chose AMD EPYC processors to exclusively power the first offering in its new Tau VM family. In enterprise, we see demand accelerating as more than 100 third gen EPYC processor platforms are now in production from HP, Lenovo, Supermicro, Cisco, and others.”

What Will be Lynn Comp’s Role at AMD?

With AMD’s EPYC infra powering cloud instances for customers, including four of the biggest global cloud vendors, the former Intel executive is hired to bring about further growth in this core segment.

Besides the advancement of AMD’s business prospects, Comp’s hiring is also to fill the void left behind by the departure of Vladimir RozanovichOpens a new window to Lenovo earlier this year. Rozanovich was the corporate vice president for enterprise and server sales at AMD for eight years and the director since mid-1996.

Comp will be in charge of all commercial activities pertaining to cloud data centers. An AMD spokesperson told CRN, “Lynn comes to AMD with more than 20 years of experience in data center, IT infrastructure strategy, and product planning, and will be a key member of the EPYC leadership team as we continue to expand our cloud business.”

Comp has been at Intel for 22 years and has worked her way up, starting from technical roles. She also worked at Motorola Mobility and Motorola Semiconductor for five years each before briefly joining Digital Semiconductor, Bsquare, and finally Intel.

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