Key Highlights:
- AMD has hired Lynn Comp, a former Intel data center executive to manage the cloud business for the chipmaker’s EPYC chips.
- According to her LinkedIn biography, Comp was most recently a vice president within Intel’s Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Visual Infrastructure Unit.
- The chipmaker has previously said it expects EPYC CPUs to power more than 400 cloud instances by the end of the year.
New Hiring for AMD
AMD has hired a former Intel data center executive to manage the cloud business for the chipmaker’s EPYC chips, as the chipmaker attempts to wrest more server market share from its main competition.
Lynn Comp, a 22-year Intel veteran, has been named corporate vice president of the Cloud Business Group, according to the corporation located in Santa Clara, California. Dan McNamara, another Intel veteran who has led AMD’s Server Business Unit since the beginning of 2020, will be her boss.
According to an AMD spokeswoman, Comp would handle all go-to-market operations for cloud and “mega data center” clients. She will also be responsible for the company’s “engineering, optimization, and benchmarking functions.”
Her hire comes just a few months after the resignation of AMD’s corporate vice president for mega data center and cloud sales, Vladimir Rozanovich. Rozanovich departed the chipmaker to become the head of Lenovo’s North American operations. Simultaneously, AMD appointed Citrix veteran Brad C. Smith as corporate vice president of cloud sales.
According to her LinkedIn biography, Comp was most recently a vice president within Intel’s Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Visual Infrastructure Unit, where she “pioneered and incubated” the first discrete GPU for data centers utilizing Intel’s Xe architecture.
Her responsibilities included collaborating on video distribution, cloud graphics, and media processing with content delivery networks and over-the-top media distributors.
She was formerly a senior director in Intel’s data center communications division, where she focused on 5G and virtualized network rollout sales enablement for communication service providers.
A new class of virtual machines
SADA and Intel began a trial initiative earlier this year to improve cloud instances based on Intel’s Xeon CPUs for the solution provider’s top clients, as part of increased investments made by the semiconductor giant to preserve its market dominance in the cloud against AMD and other competitors.
AMD has made significant gains in the cloud infrastructure industry. EPYC CPUs are expected to run more than 400 cloud instances by the end of the year, according to the chipmaker. This includes a new class of virtual machines that, according to Google Cloud, offer a superior price-performance ratio than those powered by Intel or Arm CPUs.
According to Ward, AMD has also won the early stages of the secret computing battle, with Google Cloud selecting EPYC over Intel’s Xeon for a Confidential VMs offering introduced last year. This is one of the reasons that have contributed to AMD increasing its x86 server CPU share over Intel to 9.5 percent in the second quarter of 2021, up 3.7 points from the previous year.
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