Beyond the headlines, how is AMD EPYC setting standards for enterprise AI?
At AMD Advancing AI 2025, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Dan McNamara, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Server Business at AMD. Dan shares insights on how AMD’s EPYC platform is influencing the enterprise AI landscape and the server market. Explore the foundational role of CPUs in modern AI deployments, directly addressing enterprise momentum, EPYC momentum, and compelling customer traction.
Key takeaways include:
🔹EPYC Turin’s Market Traction: Discover the remarkable traction of the 5th Gen EPYC Turin platform in the enterprise market since its launch, exploring compelling customer adoption, deployment scale, and its direct contribution to AMD’s substantial x86 server market share growth.
🔹CPU’s Foundational Role in Enterprise AI: Understand how AMD EPYC processors are strategically positioned to powerfully support modern enterprise AI workloads, especially as inferencing demands and model complexities continue to scale across diverse industries.
🔹Sustaining Competitive Leadership: Learn about AMD’s relentless commitment to maintaining its leadership in performance, energy efficiency, and total cost of ownership, navigating intensifying competitive dynamics in enterprise and cloud data center deployments.
🔹Innovations for Future AI Demands: Gain insights into the key innovations AMD is actively prioritizing to meet the escalating compute demands of enterprises, particularly as they prepare for the next wave of AI integration and the widespread adoption of AI.
Learn more at AMD.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in San Jose at AMD’s Advancing AI Event 2025. Dan it has been an amazing event. I mean the walk ons. Sam Altman XAI those were surprises. And then of course we had the Microsofts out there. Pretty amazing event.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a who’s who. And then of course, if you read the ecosystem announcements, saw the solutions provider, there was very little debate that there’s a significant entry here and that AMD is looking to grab the market. And I thought it was a really positive day overall.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, the Rackscale solutions were a big reminder of everything it takes to pull a solution together. CPU, gpu, scale up and scale out networking inside of a rack. And it’s funny, we’re very fixated when it comes to AI on the GPU. But quite frankly, you can’t do what you need to do without the CPU and the CPU for pretty much the other 90% of the workloads. Outside of AI, it’s the only game in town. And I can’t imagine a better guy to talk to about that than Dan McNamara who runs EPYC for AMD. Dan, welcome to the show. Good to see you.
Dan McNamara: Thank you. Great to see you guys.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it is great. I mean, it’s just great that you pointed that out, Pat, because it is the GPU, but it’s also the CPU, it’s the networking, it’s the power. And anyone that has a missing component of any of those realizes very quickly you need all these things to be successful. But I mean, EPYC has done tremendously well. It’s done tremendously well, Dan, outside of a pure AI play, gaining a lot of market share. We’ve been watching that closely and of course now with the AI, it’s creating a vector of new demand. You know, you, you introduced the fifth generation EPYC Turin several months ago. Walk us through the kind of traction you’re seeing. We’re watching that market share grow. You know, it seems to be going really well.
Dan McNamara: Yeah. So it’s a super exciting time for us. Obviously today was wonderful. But when you talk about, you know, the CPU business, Turin, we launched it back in October and I’ve been over the last. Pat, actually, since the last time I saw you, I think I’ve been on the road exclusively talking to enterprise and cloud customers. So we’re seeing a dramatic traction in terms of if you look at the cloud, we’re up over a thousand instances. If you look at the OEM base, we’re up over Turin alone’s over 120 platforms. So it’s really starting to roll and some of the things that I’m seeing across the enterprise is really the focus. Four years ago we were talking about moving from Rome to Milan and Milan was a real, really good inflection for us in the enterprise. But now it’s a great conversation in terms of there’s some workloads still on Milan, there’s some on Genoa and then a bunch are moving to Turin. So it’s just exciting. It’s across all verticals. Right. FSI Telco. You probably saw the Nokia announcement that we just announced with Nokia Cloud on Turin. It’s retail, it’s healthcare. So we’re very, very excited about the traction across both cloud and enterprise on prem. And we’re also seeing a nice pull of cloud instances into the enterprise too, which is also great.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s funny, I’m an ex AMD-er.
Daniel Newman: Never told me that before.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. You know, I launched a chip called Opteron when I was there. In fact, I hired the first product manager for Opteron, saw the market share go up and then it went to about zero. Okay. And then the fact that you have record market share now is absolutely amazing. And you know, 50% market share at certain hyperscalers, enterprise typically always lags on adoption and that’s really kind of where you’re going. But I have to ask you, like, how has the team done this? I mean, it’s not just some magic that comes in and waves the wand. How are you doing this?
Dan McNamara: Yeah, it’s a great question. So first and foremost, there’s really three pillars to talk about. Right. First is to build the best silicon, right perf per dollar, perf per watt. Just optimize for workloads and deliver gen on gen big gains. But also build the trust of the customer and deliver on time. Do what you say. That’s first. Second is really about building the broad ecosystem and enabling what I call efficient modernization. Right. So building solutions that drive big cost savings or consolidation and Capex savings and energy savings. So that’s been really the focus. And then the third pillar really is about AI. This end to end AI. How do you plug into and enable both enterprise and cloud customers to drive their AI needs? So those are the three key pillars we’re very, very focused on.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, your say do ratio is amazing in what you’re doing. Execution is great.
Daniel Newman: And I want to congratulate you on that Opteron market share. But I did want to also ask you where you were when it went back to zero?
Patrick Moorhead: I was still at the company.
Daniel Newman: Okay. Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: No, no, actually I had left. Yeah, you left.
Daniel Newman: Of course you left.
Dan McNamara: I would say, thankfully Opteron doesn’t come up anymore in Rome. Time frame it did. You still have to hear about it.
Daniel Newman: Well, I think that’s the signal that you’ve built that trust in every layer, every new release, every time you win. And it’s not just a few customers anymore, it’s many customers. And I think that becomes the reference. And those hyperscalers really make it easier to win those enterprises. I mean that’s been big. So let’s look into the future because I know you only have a few minutes with. We really appreciate you making the time, Dan, but we have a new wave of compute demand and you are worried about the CPU business. Pat’s point about the GPUs is real. The future is kind of an AI architecture. GPU will lead the volume in some ways, maybe not the total number, but the dollar volume. But the CPU is still really critical. What are the critical innovations that AMD needs to drive to meet that AI need?
Dan McNamara: Yeah, it’s kind of what we rolled out today. And what’s exciting about it is if you think about us, right, we’ve been very good at optimizing like we just talked about, what are we doing in server, right. And GPUs have had a good track, little sort of run here, you know, getting back into the market, right. And then you’ve got networking. But what’s the, you know, how this becomes really transformational is tying this all together with the Helios rack and the complete full stack solution. So if you think about it, the best compute engines open, open again, stay open, a completely open ecosystem and then lastly deliver these full stack solutions. And I think that’s really the transformational journey we’re on and that’s what we’re really all excited about. And we’ll all continue to optimize individually, but we will optimize at this full rack level.
Patrick Moorhead: Are you changing the recipe specifically for enterprises, though?
Dan McNamara: Enterprises will be. I just had an enterprise roundtable with a number of folks and it’s really with them, they’re all in a different spot on their journey and that does need to be a little bit more a la carte, truly, and that’s how we’re going to approach it. But we do believe that delivering this full stack completely verified and validated is super critical going forward.
Daniel Newman: That’s also where you’ll have your partners, your solutions builders that will work with you. You’ll use the validated solutions, but they’ll build it to scale so the AMD doesn’t have to take all that on, but you give them a lot of that reference architecture that they need to get it done. Dan, I want to thank you so much for spending a little time with us. We know it’s a crazy time here, but a great event.
Dan McNamara: Yeah. Thank you guys. You guys are great and really appreciate the time.
Patrick Moorhead: Thanks, Dan.
Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for being part of this Six Five On The Road. We are here in San Jose, California, at Advancing AI along with AMD. Hit Subscribe. Join us for all of our other coverage and content here at the event. We got to go. We’ll see you all later. Bye. Bye.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
