The classic battle between Intel and AMD for market share in data center has been joined by Nvidia, Arm and Marvell as each manufacturer races -- sometimes together, sometimes separately -- towards a future where their product dominates the chilly, florescent-tube-lighted server room landscape.

AMD’s partnership with Microsoft on the Azure HBv3 virtual machines enhanced by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC, with the Milan X chip, seems to have a favored position over Intel’s Ice Lake chip. But old rivalries might be as relevant as a 386-processor, in the face of competition from Nvidia and ARM.

In late May, Nvidia deployed its Arm-based Hopper GPUs and Grace CPU “superchips,” a move that could prove to be a massive compute shift in the data center market. Among the first computer makers to release the new chips will be industry bigs such as Asus, Foxconn Industrial Internet, Gigabyte, QCT, Supermicro and Wiwynn.

Those chips can be used for a wide range of workloads spanning digital twins, AI, high performance computing, cloud graphics and gaming. Systems containing the Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip are expected to begin shipping from those companies in the first half of 2023.

Intel last month launched a second-generation Habana AI deep learning processor to churn massive AI workloads at the data center -- a result of Intel buying Habana Labs for $2 billion in 2019. The new chips include the Habana Gaudi2 and Habana Greco, built on a seven-nanometer architecture. Gaudi2, the company said, was designed to bring improved deep learning performance and efficiency to cloud and on-premises systems.

As part of CRN’s 2022 Software-Defined Data Center 50, here are the five chip vendors paving the way inside the data center.