Intel continues to hold a commanding position in this space, with deep, many-year relationships with key datacenter players and server vendors, and it presents customers with hardware as one part of the server solution rather than focus on pure silicon.
To that end, with thousands of engineers fine-tuning myriad datacenter applications to run as efficiently as possible on Intel Architecture, the decision to switch a server installation from Xeon to Epyc isn't, in the real world, immediately straightforward. Things move slow, usually on a multi-year cycle. Rival Intel will also claim that the latest Xeon processors are better-suited for emerging workloads such as AI, and that related products such as Optane memory and upcoming accelerators alter the overall performance dynamic more into its favour. Then there's the just-announced Cooper Lake architecture that promises up to 56 socketed cores, multi-chip implementation, and greater memory bandwidth - leading to Xeon and Epyc becoming more alike than ever before.