New reports surfaced today claiming that AMD might take some of the data center business of the search engine giant, Google weakening what it can take away from another market leader, Intel. The move is crucial to both AMD and Intel, which is a major forward step to the former and a major backward step to the latter. Over the years, the market is overwhelmingly dominated by Intel and AMD is now trying to push its AMD EPYC CPUs.
Google used to be the exclusive partner of some of the early server chips of Intel. However, rumors have it that the search engine giant is considering switching to AMD's EPYC server platform as reported by Lynx Equity Research. According to analysts KC Rajkumar, there were several whispers of rumblings of dissatisfaction at Google towards the server platform of Intel.
Engineers of Google allegedly have issues with Intel's ME or management Engine, which is a computer subsystem in the chipsets of the company's CPU. The issue, according to reports, is so alarming that some engineers have begun disabling the ME for some of their servers. For years, several privacy activists have been warning companies that Intel's ME could be utilized as a backdoor by other malicious parties.
Additionally, Intel's Management Engine has been discovered to have a lot of vulnerabilities for the past years. It can be recalled that Google was among the first few companies to disable its Chromebooks' HT or Hyper-Threading technology after it discovered several MDS flaws. Lynx Equity Research also reports that Google is currently making its own server boards with AMD EPYC server CPUs.
Interestingly, this is a drastic change for Google considering that the company is almost exclusively using Intel server CPUs. Additionally, the search engine giant recently began using AMD GPUs for its Google Stradia game streaming service. The alleged split between Intel and Google is not yet official, and even though the search engine giant announces a new partnership with AMD, it does not instantly mean that it will exclusively use AMD server CPUs.
Also, it is highly unlikely that Google will remove every single use of an Intel CPU from its massive data centers. It is possible that the chips will be gradually replaced as soon as their life cycle is over. The AMD EPYC server CPUs could have swayed several large businesses in the search engine giant according to Seeking Alpha. However, these reports are based on whispers, so it is far from an official or closed deal.
