You need to look at chef, puppet, answible, Azure services bus etc. People aren't spending anywhere near the kind of money your thinking of to do this. The standard web application hierarchic ( presentation, application, db, security/auth) already allows for significant scale. I was talking to an enterprise architect today of a small 400 seat org who was all excited by Azures new tempting abilities he can now spin up an entire environment from a single line of power shell. This isn't future world leading edge stuff, this is now, if your company thinks its leading edge stuff then chances are they are behind their competitors.
I called you a troll because AMD's potential competitive advantages have been spelt out night and day, yet you cant acknowledge anything, sorry but that is a troll. I never pretended that Zen will be everything to everyone, its doesn't have to be, there is a silent majority of server workloads and that is what i was demonstrating to you. But you are saying with certainty that Zen will be nothing to everyone just because of what looks to be like a small IPC deficit.
It might not be a "small IPC deficit only" we don't know where Zen will end up, in all likely hood its going to be a BIG IPC deficit, compared to Sky Lake Xeons. Even if they were equal in IPC and over all performance in the various tasks, once a company like Intel has the entire market, AMD is going to have to lift mountains to get in. Price/performance is not the object anymore as the scales of economy will be all on Intel side. AMD needs to balance that out first before they can even think of pushing forward.
I used the battle analogy because it was best suited for this. Why do you think business schools make you read sun tzu's art of war or the book of five rings?
Intel's greatest strength isn't their processors, its the their size and dominance of the market, processors are like the individual soldiers on the battle field. But their size is like the US armed forces. And if US wants to go into to Iraq they will, like they did. If Intel wants to go at AMD they will, it doesn't work too well the other way around though, AMD will have to pick and choose the left overs and then strategically take small chucks out of Intel, which is not going to start for a long time, because businesses although want competition on the processor side, they can't move that fast and they also have to see what is best for them.
Companies like what you just mentioned are doing this for a business, they aren't going to go over to AMD unless AMD has some sort of advantage over Intel that can be used to satisfy a need. I don't have any ideas where Intel can't match AMD for what AMD has shown so far.
Also this takes time too, because their clients have to also be aware of that need and are willing to monetize on that need as well otherwise that need won't be used.
Further look at this, when AMD started losing ground against nV in graphics, look at what they did with their business model, they switched over to consoles, they down sized their desktop capabilities for high end and are refocusing their primary objectives in the short term. This is with them not falling too far behind like what happened in the CPU side. Their CPU division will have to do these kind of tactics and more so because its much further behind right now. They need to find niches where Intel can't compete with them, and the server market is not where its going to be. The needs of the server market as a service to other companies are fairly grounded.
