Highlights From Intel And AMD's Processor Conference Presentations

Baird has Outperform ratings on both Intel and AMD, with price targets for the shares at $45 and $20, respectively.

Focus On FPGA For Intel

Analyst Tristan Gerra noted that Intel emphasized on the need for hardware specialization through application specific standard parts, field-programmable gate arrays, etc. in certain applications. Intel suggested that FPGAs can provide high performance and reduce the cost of ownership for specific loads.

The analyst also noted that Intel said it provides functional abstraction, helping developers write in any code and offering platform compatibility and a complete solutions stock.

Intel also said with Project BrainWave a new level of cloud performance for real-time AI computation with Stratix 10 can be achieved in real time. The company's targeted FPGA acceleration uses include machine learning, encryption/compression, big data analytics, and Network Function Virtualization.

Baird also noted that Intel announced last week the first acceleration programmable card, with its Arria 10GX FPGA, which is expected to be available in the first half of 2018. The firm believes Intel will soon announce several OEMs shipping this product in their servers.

The firm also noted that Intel's Xeon Scalable with integrated FPGA would be available in the second half of 2018.

"Intel's FPGA group is working with Intel's data center, networking product, and ADAS groups," the firm added.

AMD Sheds Light On EPYC Prospects

Baird noted AMD's estimate that it would achieve 10-percent market share target for its data center processor EPYC in one to two years. AMD said EPYC's architecture responded to customers' need for higher core count, scalability and I/O, with the Zen core architecture offering significantly lower cache and higher scalability.

Baird also referred to AMD's view that a multichip module approach provided many advantages including higher yields, increased feature sets and performance.

"AMD's comparison of EPYC versus Broadwell (not versus Purley) leads the company to claim up to a 1.76x performance/watt advantage," the firm said.