That, and the fact that it wants Intel – which dominates the global server compute market, and supplies Microsoft's data centers with chips – to slash its prices.
It shouldn't escape notice that as soon as AMD released a chip that competed with Intel the prices of the Intel range in competition were slashed by over 30% overnight.
So, Microsoft want Intel's server chip prices lower? Would anybody care to give odds as what's going to happen to Xeon pricing when the Ryzen Naples server variant gets released in about 3 months?
Just stop buying exclusively Intel because (presumably) they offer a better price if you do. They only do that so they can then wipe out the competition and crank prices up, at which point your short term discount becomes a long term disaster as has happened here.
If large companies (and cloud providers certainly count!) bought at least a certain percentage of AMD chips then it'd keep AMD afloat and in competition, which means better chips for a lower price as a result of healthy competition.
Without AMD's competition in the past, I honestly believe that we would be paying a lot more for a small fraction of the processing power available now and this is true of the future as well. If AMD goes down then R&D is practically going to halt and prices are going to go up like a rocket.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
