AMD, Arm, and non-Intel servers soar as overall market stalls
(2020/12/10)
- Reference: 1607583733
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/10/idc_quarterly_server_tracker_q3_2020/
- Source link:
The world’s server market stalled in the year’s third quarter, says analyst firm IDC.
Revenue rose 2.2 percent year-on-year to $22.565bn. Shipments shrank to 3,065,791, down 5,453 compared to the same time in 2019.
The firm says non-X86 kit was the hot spot, with revenue growth of 10.4 percent to a total of around $1.6bn. Sadly IDC doesn’t break out which architectures led the charge, but it did say that revenue from Arm-powered products grew 430.5 percent year-on-year “albeit on a very small base".
AMD had a good quarter, too, as revenues from servers it powers jumped 112.4 percent.
Dell remains the market leader with $3.758bn of revenue and over 500,000 machines sent out the door, a 0.6 percent dip in revenue and drop of 103 shipments. The combined HPE/ New H3C Group is the world’s second-most-prolific supplier at $3,597bn revenue and 425,117 shipments, down 3.8 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. Cisco used to sell enough servers to be worth a mention in IDC reports. It’s not there now, instead lumped into the amorphous “Rest of Market” and its $4.4bn revenue and 511,000 shipments.
How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers [1]READ MORE
As is usually the case, server-makers that ship direct to hyperscale users collectively outperformed suppliers of more conventional kit. Such suppliers collectively scooped $6.3bn of revenue and sent 911,000 machines out the door.
China’s market grew by 14.8 percent, which may be why Inspur and Huawei both recorded big jumps in shipments and revenue. EMEA went backwards by 4.5 percent and Japan slumped by 21.4 percent. The rest of the world struggled along with a point or three of growth.
High-end and mid-market sales slumped everywhere, leaving volume servers to scoop $19bn of the market and score 5.8 percent growth.
IDC didn’t say why sales dipped. VMware may have offered a possible answer when, on its recent earnings call, execs [2]said sales had been slowed by customers just not coming to the office. Servers are hands-on products, especially when new, so it makes little sense to buy them if you can’t get into the data centre to get them working. That hypothesis could also explain why smaller servers did well, as it may be safer to work in a small server room compared to a larger bit barn. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/25/vmware_q3_21/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Revenue rose 2.2 percent year-on-year to $22.565bn. Shipments shrank to 3,065,791, down 5,453 compared to the same time in 2019.
The firm says non-X86 kit was the hot spot, with revenue growth of 10.4 percent to a total of around $1.6bn. Sadly IDC doesn’t break out which architectures led the charge, but it did say that revenue from Arm-powered products grew 430.5 percent year-on-year “albeit on a very small base".
AMD had a good quarter, too, as revenues from servers it powers jumped 112.4 percent.
Dell remains the market leader with $3.758bn of revenue and over 500,000 machines sent out the door, a 0.6 percent dip in revenue and drop of 103 shipments. The combined HPE/ New H3C Group is the world’s second-most-prolific supplier at $3,597bn revenue and 425,117 shipments, down 3.8 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. Cisco used to sell enough servers to be worth a mention in IDC reports. It’s not there now, instead lumped into the amorphous “Rest of Market” and its $4.4bn revenue and 511,000 shipments.
How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers [1]READ MORE
As is usually the case, server-makers that ship direct to hyperscale users collectively outperformed suppliers of more conventional kit. Such suppliers collectively scooped $6.3bn of revenue and sent 911,000 machines out the door.
China’s market grew by 14.8 percent, which may be why Inspur and Huawei both recorded big jumps in shipments and revenue. EMEA went backwards by 4.5 percent and Japan slumped by 21.4 percent. The rest of the world struggled along with a point or three of growth.
High-end and mid-market sales slumped everywhere, leaving volume servers to scoop $19bn of the market and score 5.8 percent growth.
IDC didn’t say why sales dipped. VMware may have offered a possible answer when, on its recent earnings call, execs [2]said sales had been slowed by customers just not coming to the office. Servers are hands-on products, especially when new, so it makes little sense to buy them if you can’t get into the data centre to get them working. That hypothesis could also explain why smaller servers did well, as it may be safer to work in a small server room compared to a larger bit barn. ®
Get our [3]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/25/vmware_q3_21/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Smaller servers
I’m not sure I buy the hypothesis about a connection between small server rooms and small servers - small server rooms obviously have fewer servers, but there is no reason to suppose they are individually cheaper. If anything, I would expect them to come in *higher* on the IDC methodology:
First, it counts software sold with new servers, so a lot of small customers are going to be adding to it with things like Windows licences, where larger customers would be more likely to have a separate with software vendors, and more likely to have a significant Linux fleet.
Second, it counts parts sold with the server, so people who add memory/storage/etc separately are under-represented. That’s more likely to happen with mid-size or larger businesses, where the available savings are much larger and the benefits of standardisation greater.
Third, small environments are much more likely to use DAS, which means higher costs for a single server, and thus more in a higher bracket, rather than shared storage.
Related to the above, I would also say that small companies are far more likely to have been fully remote (hence in the category of not there to set it up), and to do most setup manually, whereas a bigger outfit would have maintained a minimally-staffed datacentre, and be able to automate (or at least remotely) do almost the entire setup after physically racking kit.
One thing which might well have skewed the market downwards is that 1S EPYC covers a lot of use cases previously in the 2S bracket, but the total platform cost is lower - and the stated AMD growth would be consistent with this.