AMD thinks it can address 80 percent of the server market with Zen

AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed the company has a Zen design win and that the company is on track to sample this year. Zen will first be introduced in the desktop market, which will be towards the end of this year if it doesn't get delayed any further, while the server market will go in full swing in 2017. Asked about the performance level of Zen in the server market, Su claimed AMD expects to be able to address 80 percent of the server CPU market with Zen:

Hans Mosesmann
Hey Lisa, a clarification on Zen you said you had some design wins already on the server side of that roadmap. Can you give us a sense on what kind of server wins and what kind of an opportunity you see in terms of market share for the next several years as you come back to the market?

Lisa Su
Yes, so Hans, overall the Zen design win, we have been engaged very early on with you know large OEM and cloud providers on the Zen design point and the platforms that would be useful for Zen. So we have closed our first design win, we are working you know very closely with these OEM partners to make sure that they bring up their platforms concurrently with our own design validation and testing. I think the main message is we are on track with the schedule that we previously discussed in terms of sampling this year. We will introduce first in desktop and so we are having conversations with some of the PC OEMs about getting their platforms ready for desktop and then we will go into enterprise server first full year in 2017.

Hans Mosesmann
Okay and then as a follow up, what kind of performance point should we look at your initial Zen in the server space, is it Zeon E3 class type products or E5s or maybe you can help with some granularity there if you can?

Lisa Su
Yes, we believe that we'll be able to address let's call it you know 80% of the server CPU market with our Zen class of products. So that's a very high end but you know really the meat of the market.