

In rush to buy CPUs, Intel won’t be the only winner
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It has been a sad few years for the venerable central processing unit. The one-time standard-bearer of the computing revolution has been pushed aside in recent years with the rise of generative artificial intelligence powered by graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used for a lot more than graphics these days.But now attention is swinging back to the main brain of data-center computing, the CPU.
With one big change: Unlike in the past, Intel will have to share the spotlight, and may not even be the primary winner.In the past two weeks, three server CPU companies—Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm Holdings—reported their earnings, and each gave commentary indicating that the market will be larger in a few years than they had previously thought.“In recent months, we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reasserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in April. “This is not just our wishful thinking, it is what we hear from our customers.”Arm has projected that the server CPU market will hit $100 billion by 2030, and this week AMD doubled its own estimate to $120 billion.
The three companies had $34 billion in combined data-center revenue last year.That sort of market expansion would be a huge boon to these companies, but to keep it in context, Nvidia is expected to earn more than $150 billion in data-center sales in just the next two quarters.Before the release of ChatGPT in 2022, servers rarely needed GPUs to do heavy lifting for intense mathematics. Expensive GPU-filled servers were overkill, and data-center customers mostly bought CPU servers to run websites, databases, applications, and other traditional workloads.
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