AUSTIN, Texas, March 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Liftr Insights, a pioneer in market intelligence about hyperscale cloud infrastructure, has identified vast market share changes over the past year of which others have been unaware.

What is Cloud Chip Share?

The top four public cloud providers represent a significant portion of semiconductor chip consumption with their hyperscale infrastructure. Their purchase decisions affect the overall chip market, so investment portfolio managers and research analysts, as well as supply chain vendors, pay close attention.

Making otherwise opaque information visible

“Our market intelligence, leveraging unique datasets, provides visibility into infrastructure activity which would otherwise be opaque,” says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. “Our customers never expected to see this dramatic of a shift among the technology providers. It’s been exciting to watch the changes from one of our monthly analyses to the next.”

What is changing?

Liftr Insights data demonstrates that over the past 18 months, Intel’s share of offerings in the public cloud market has decreased over 12%. While our data shows AMD gaining ground, the true disrupter is Amazon Web Services. AWS is producing, marketing and expanding deployments of their own ARM-based Graviton processors. Liftr Insight’s data shows that AWS Graviton now makes up nearly 4% of offerings across the top four CSPs and almost 14% of AWS’s offerings. This is up from less than 1% 18 months earlier.

Early Insights

“There are rumors that Azure and other providers may follow AWS’s lead,” says Schadt. “Our customers will be among the first to see and track when those changes occur.”

Liftr Insights

Liftr Insights generates market intelligence to portfolio managers and research analysts as well as supply chain customers. Among the data obtained are configurations, components, deployment geo and pricing for:

Server processors: Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and AWS’s Arm-based Graviton brands
Datacenter compute accelerators: GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs and AI chips from NVIDIA, Xilinx, Intel, AMD, AWS and Google
Among the companies tracked are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud, as well as semiconductor vendors AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Xilinx. Liftr Insights subject matter experts translate company-specific service provider data into actionable alternative data. Technology investors can easily ingest this timely, standardized and operationally-compliant information into their predictive financial models.

Microsoft has announced to extend its confidential computing options available to Azure Cloud customers in partnership with chip-maker AMD.

The company said it will be the first major cloud provider to offer confidential virtual machines on the new AMD ‘EPYC 7003’ series processors.

With the third-gen AMD EPYC CPU-backed confidential computing virtual machines (VMs), Azure confidential computing now enables customers to encrypt entire VMs confidentially, enable confidentiality without recompiling code, and benefit from a host of Azure-specific enhancements.

“Today you can deliver confidential workloads on Azure with the broadest choice of hardware as well as resources spanning virtual machines, containers, SQL, and beyond,” the company said in a statement on Monday.

As a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, Microsoft is also an innovator in confidential computing which extends those protections to data running on the processor itself.

“For more than three years, financial services, governments, health care providers, and even messaging companies have been using Azure confidential computing to unlock new scenarios like multi-party machine learning and move their more sensitive applications to the cloud,” said Mark Russinovich CTO and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure.

The AMD EPYC-CPU powered Azure VMs are fully encrypted at runtime, fulfilling the promise of confidential computing by protecting your data even when it is in use.

IBM and AMD today announced a multi-year joint development agreement to enhance and extend the security and artificial intelligence offerings of both companies. This joint development agreement has been planned to expand this vision by building upon open-source software, open standards, and open system architectures in order to drive confidential computing in hybrid cloud environments. It would also support a broad range of accelerators across high-performance computing, and enterprise-critical capabilities such as virtualisation and encryption.

According to Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, “The commitment of AMD to technological innovation aligns with our mission to develop and accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud to help connect, secure and power our digital world.”

He further stated, “IBM is focused on giving our clients choice, agility and security in our hybrid cloud offerings through advanced research, development and scaling of new technologies.”

“This agreement between AMD and IBM aligns well with our long-standing commitment to collaborating with leaders in the industry,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and CTO, AMD. “AMD is excited to extend our work with IBM on AI, accelerating data centre workloads, and improving security across the cloud.”

Securing highly sensitive data has still continued to be a challenge for many companies. According to data from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, this has led to cybersecurity being the top barrier for adoption as well as the top criteria for selection of cloud providers.

According to Gartner, confidential computing potentially omits the remaining barrier to hybrid cloud adoption for highly regulated businesses or any organisation concerned about unauthorised third-party access to data in use in the public cloud.

Confidential computing is a technology, enabled by hardware, that allows the data associated with a running virtual machine to be encrypted, including while workloads are running. This capability helps prevent would-be attackers and bad actors from accessing confidential information, even in the event of a break-in. Confidential computing for hybrid cloud unlocks new potential for enterprise adoption of hybrid cloud computing, especially in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and insurance.

Engagement between AMD and IBM researchers on joint development activities under the agreement is now underway.