There is no doubt that AMD EPYC processors have been extremely successful, so much so that according to several sources demand is far outstripping supply, a reality that, coupled with the still-pervasive shortage of semiconductors in the technology sector, leaves us an ideal cocktail for a price increase to occur.
That is precisely the direction in which one of the latest reports by Jordan Klein, managing director of the investment bank Mizuho Securities, points out, who has said that this year there will be important changes in the sector of professional processors for servers and centers of data, and that in this sense one of the most important novelties will be an increase in the prices of AMD EPYC chips.
This source ensures that the price of AMD EPYC processors will rise between 10% and 30%, although this rise will not occur equally in all cases, nor will it affect all customers in the same way. In theory, strategic cloud-centric customers will see a much smaller price increase, which is understandable considering how important those customers are to the Sunnyvale giant.
In the report we can also see another important detail, and that is that, as we have said, since demand exceeds supply, customers really have no room for negotiation, that is, we would be facing a case of “take it or leave it”, which means that most customers should be willing to accept that price increase for AMD EPYC processors. A 10% increase in price could be “acceptable” in most cases, but that possible 30% increase would already be somewhat more complicated to fit.
We must bear in mind that, seeing the current situation in the technological world, and the problems that the shortage of chips continues to cause, this movement by AMD would be totally normal and understandable. As far as Intel is concerned, the same source of this information says that the chip giant does not plan to raise the price of its Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors to keep them at a more competitive level against AMD EPYC.
A few very busy months await us in the server processor sector. Intel plans to launch the new Xeon Sapphire Rapids between the second and third quarter of 2022, while AMD will also release later this year the EPYC Genoa, based on the Zen 4 architecture and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm node.
