What AMD and Intel’s Alliance Means for Data Center Operators

 The two rivals have teamed up to create an x86 advisory group to fight off growing competition from Arm-based chips. Here’s what analysts are saying.




AMD and Intel this week announced plans to collaborate together to improve and shape the future of x86. For data center operators, it’s a move that can result in improved software and hardware performance, and easier management of their IT infrastructure, analysts say.

The two rival chipmakers on Tuesday (Oct. 15) announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to ensure architecture compatibility, simplify software development and develop innovative and scalable solutions.  

"This announcement probably surprised some people," said Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, a research and advisory firm. "It’s unprecedented to see these two companies work together in any capacity and agree on anything other than x86 as an architecture."

AMD and Intel’s large tech partners have signed onto the effort, including Broadcom, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat.

At issue is the increased competition from Arm-based chips and the fact that while AMD and Intel use the same x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), they’ve historically done some things differently – such as security or the implementation of AVX-512, a workload-specific accelerator that enables AI and HPC workloads to run faster.

“The whole notion of commonality of x86 was starting to go down these two paths that weren’t 180 degrees out of phase, but they started to kind of drift into their own kind of specialized world,” said Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Potential Impact of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group

That divergence has forced software makers like Broadcom’s VMware and Nutanix to modify some of their source code to support Intel and AMD chips. The same goes for hardware makers like HPE and Lenovo that offer management software and cloud service providers that build software stacks and management platforms for their Intel and AMD environments, Kimball said.

More specifically, they said the group’s goals are threefold: enhance hardware and software compatibility while accelerating new cutting-edge features; simplify architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across Intel and AMD x86 products; and enable greater, more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and software.

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