March 8 news According to foreign media (PCWorld) reports, Naples chips will be officially listed in the second quarter of this year, directly targeting the server market that Intel firmly occupies. Forrest Norrod, AMD’s current server business executive, said: "Naples" high-performance server processors for the enterprise market will revive the chip company AMD's glory in the server field. The processor uses the latest Zen architecture and has 32 cores. This is the first big move for AMD to return to the server market. Forrest Norrod previously served as general manager of Dell's server business and was known for his outspoken personality. He did not hide the strategic intentions of competing with Intel. Today, Intel holds more than 90% of the server chip market share. The goal of AMD is to attract customers step by step. The price factor may become AMD's secret weapon. Intel’s chips are known for their high prices, with the most expensive chip at $8898. The emergence of cheap AMD products can provide customers with more choices and bargaining space. According to Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst of Insight 64, from the perspective of AMD's previous pricing strategy, the Naples chip will certainly be more competitive than Intel's similar products. The Ryzen desktop processor released by AMD late last year is much cheaper than its Intel equivalent. AMD was once Intel's number one enemy, but a series of operational mistakes made its server business lag behind its rivals. Five years ago, AMD's Bulldozer chip architecture ended in failure. Then AMD began to provide ARM chips, but due to bad demand, AMD gradually declining in the server market. Naples is not the only new film based on the Zen architecture. Norrod said that after the introduction of server chips, more chip products will also appear. Since not everyone will buy 32-core chips, AMD may also release fewer core products. So far, the outside world's reaction to the Zen chip is "pleasant," Norrod said. This generation of Naples is only for single-slot and dual-slot markets. The dual-socket system supports up to eight memory channels and is suitable for memory applications such as databases that have higher bandwidth requirements. Naples offers more I/O and memory capacity than its Intel counterparts. This feature will facilitate machine learning, especially when co-processors such as chips and GPUs work together. AMD hopes to pair the Zen chip with the upcoming Vega GPU to create a chipset for machine learning. The unique high-bandwidth architecture that connects the two slots in the chip makes it ideal for dual-socket servers. AMD has authorized China Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd. (THATIC for short) to produce Zen chips. The Naples chip will compete directly with the Intel Skylake server chip. At present, Google Cloud Services uses Skylake. High-performance applications are AMD's weaknesses, and Intel has been leading AMD in high-performance computing. Skylake supports the AVX-512 instruction set while AMD chips only support AVX-128. Some algorithms can achieve better performance under AVX-512. Norrod does not shy away from this. He said that although some applications work better on Intel chips, AND's Naples has its unique features to help AMD kill back the server market. If the performance is almost the same at the same time low price, then even if the speed is slightly slower, there are still customers will consider using this product.