ASE Technology Holding Co. has partnered with AMD to boost data center efficiency, according to an AMD blog post.

ASE integrated AMD’s Epyc and Ryzen processors into its systems.

This resulted in a 50% performance improvement and a 6.5% reduction in power consumption, said Jekyll Chen, director of ASE’s IT infrastructure division.

Following this upgrade, ASE is considering adopting AMD’s Instinct MI300 Series GPUs to handle growing AI workloads.

AMD, meanwhile, continues to work with TSMC on its next-gen GPUs.

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🔗 Source: Taipei Times

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ AMD’s remarkable data center comeback journey continues

The ASE-AMD partnership represents another milestone in AMD’s decade-long comeback in the data center market.

In 2014, AMD held just 1% of the server chip market under newly-appointed CEO Lisa Su, who implemented a strategic focus on high-performance computing to revitalize the company 1.

This strategy has delivered remarkable results, with AMD recently achieving $3.549 billion in datacenter revenue in Q3 2024, surpassing Intel’s $3.3 billion for the first time in history 2.

The 50% performance improvement ASE is reporting aligns with broader market validation of AMD’s EPYC processors, which have gained significant traction among major cloud providers including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon 1.

ASE’s interest in AMD’s Instinct GPUs for AI workloads further demonstrates how AMD has successfully expanded beyond traditional CPUs into the rapidly growing AI acceleration market.

2️⃣ Data center power efficiency becoming critical amid AI-driven energy crisis

The 6.5% power reduction ASE achieved with AMD processors addresses an increasingly urgent industry challenge, as data center energy consumption is projected to more than double by 2028 3.

Goldman Sachs forecasts a 165% increase in global data center power demand by 2030, driven primarily by AI workloads, which require significantly more power than traditional computing 45.

Electricity already represents the largest ongoing expense for data centers, accounting for 46% of enterprise and 60% of service provider datacenter spending, making energy efficiency improvements directly impactful to bottom-line performance 3.

This partnership exemplifies how companies are responding to both economic and environmental pressures, as AI datacenter capacity is growing at a CAGR of 40.5% through 2027, with energy consumption rising even faster at 44.7% 3.

The focus on both performance and efficiency aligns with industry best practices, as seen in facilities like MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, which has demonstrated cost savings alongside sustainability improvements 6.

3️⃣ Semiconductor manufacturing partnerships become strategic differentiators

The mention of AMD’s upcoming “Venice” processor using TSMC’s advanced 2-nanometer process highlights how manufacturing partnerships have become critical competitive advantages in the chip industry.

AMD’s roadmap transition from 14nm to 7nm and now to 2nm processes through its TSMC partnership has provided a manufacturing edge that helped the company challenge Intel’s historical dominance 7.

This manufacturing strategy contrasts with Intel’s recent struggles with advanced processes, which contributed to AMD’s market share gains as confirmed by Intel’s own CEO acknowledging likely share losses 7.

The successful validation of AMD’s fifth-generation EPYC processors at TSMC’s Arizona facility demonstrates the increasing importance of secure, geographically distributed semiconductor supply chains for data center hardware.

These manufacturing partnerships are particularly crucial as data center capacity constraints intensify, with Goldman Sachs projecting data center occupancy rates to exceed 95% by late 2026, creating strong demand for next-generation processors that deliver better performance per watt 4.

Recent AMD developments

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