Google considering shift from Intel to AMD's Epyc server platform

Google is considering shifting its cloud infrastructure from Intel to AMD Epyc-based servers

Google is considering a shift from Intel to AMD ' s Epyc server platform - and a decision on the move could be made in months.

That is according to Lynx Equity Partners analyst KC Rajkumar, who told Benzinga that AMD is on the verge of stealing a big client away from Intel.

"While the issues of Meltdown and Spectre, first discovered by Google researchers, have been addressed by Intel in terms of a bug-fix, we think there is a new issue that is causing concern," Rajkumar said.

He also disclosed that Google has started making its own server boards using AMD Epyc CPUs. "Our field research into the hardware supply-chain shows that Google-specific server boards are being built with AMD ' s Epyc server CPU, a first," Rajkumar stated.

Google is also reportedly using AMD GPUs in its Stadia game streaming platform.

This is not the first time that Google engineers have faced major issues with Intel ' s chips. In the past, Google's engineers experienced so many issues with Intel ' s Management Engine that they disabled it on some of their servers.

The company also disabled Intel ' s Hyper-Threading technology on Chromebooks after the discovery of Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) flaws.

Google has not yet released any statement on the issues that it has supposedly been facing with Intel ' s sever platform.

Even if it announces a new partnership with AMD, that won ' t necessarily mean that Google will start using AMD CPUs exclusively. But, any such move would mark a major step towards AMD gaining market share from Intel and potentially threatening Intel ' s dominance in the server market.

In recent years, AMD has managed to re-assert its position in the chip market, thanks to its current generation Ryzen CPUs, based on the same Zen/Zen2 architecture that Epyc is based on, while its Navi GPU microarchitecture has shown some promise for AMD in graphics cards.

In May, leaked benchmarks of engineering samples of AMD's 32-core and 64-core Epyc CPUs suggested that the forthcoming new server microprocessors could be among the most powerful ever produced.

Also in May, AMD confirmed that its Ryzen 3000, second-generation Epyc server CPUs and Navi GPUs will all be available from the third quarter of the year.