Intel's Emerald Rapids Server Chips Could Deliver Surprising Performance Gains

There's no doubt about it: (NASDAQ: INTC) has fallen behind Advanced Micro Devices in the server CPU market, at least technologically. Intel remains the leader in terms of market share, but it's been losing ground for the past few years. AMD had a server CPU market share of less than 1% at the end of 2017, according to Mercury Research as reported by Tom's Hardware. In the third quarter of this year, AMD's share had shot up to 23.3%.

Great server products from AMD were part of the equation, but so were chronic delays from Intel. Intel's Sapphire Rapids server CPUs, its latest family of Xeon server chips, were finally launched in January of this year after a long delay. One selling point of Sapphire Rapids was its built-in AI hardware, which is capable of accelerating some AI inference workloads. However, that feature hasn't stopped Intel from losing market share to AMD.

Intel will launch Emerald Rapids, the successor to Sapphire Rapids, on Dec. 14. That's the same day the company will officially roll out its Meteor Lake PC chips. Unlike Meteor Lake, which moves to the Intel 4 manufacturing process and introduces a slew of major changes, Emerald Rapids will employ the same Intel 7 process used by Sapphire Rapids with an updated CPU core architecture.

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Source Fool.com