Unfortunately, I don't think Intel will have much of a problem. I have been waiting for EYPC and now that it's finally available at Dell and has been fully tested and certified with vMware\VSAN I am not allowed to buy it. I am a Senior Systems Engineer and I have been told by management that we will not be buying AMD under any circumstance. I have friends around the city in similar roles and their management says the same. The real benefit of EPYC isn't the cores but, the PCIE lanes. It would allow us to physically shrink our infrastructure and save a lot of money by dumping dual socket systems we are forced to buy because of the PCIE lane cap in Intel systems.
We not only would save on physical space requirement but, on licensing too. I'm not sure what the issue is, I know we had opterons back in the day and they were fine, I guess it comes down to companies worried about support\compatibility and whether they can count on AMD to sell EPYC well into the future.
The market share will come down to pricing and from what I have seen so far, with the Dell R740/DELL R7425, Intel will discount their Xeons below EPYC. The servers I configured 16 core xeons to 16 core epyc ended up being the same price after all the discounts from Dell(intel).
1. Management don't like to buy first gen product, especially from a new vendor or company. We are all lazy, and you will have to prove that you offer something more then saving money, because sometimes money is well worth spending if it is hassle free.
2. The lower level people will have to work their way to top level management to convince them. Show them what is possible and cost benefits. AMD will also need to work a lot harder to convince them, along with lots more testing and QA
3. I think Intel were more worrying about the loss of big Cloud vendor market share anyway. That is Azure, Google, AWS, Apple along with Aliyun and Tencent Cloud. Along with a handful of other companies may be together have 70%+ of all Server Market shares. They will likely use AMD to pitch against Intel in price negotiation. The statement is basically saying, we will lower price, but you cant purchase more then 15% of your CPU from AMD.
4. Once AMD made their CPU into these cloud vendor and the likes of IBM, they will change their mind. Along with Zen 2, better and faster Memory controller, possibly PCI-E 4.0 offer more value for money.
5, I am much more worried about GF / AMD ability to produce enough chips to sell them in the market. GF surely don't have 10% of Server Market share capacity for AMD unless they stop producing for consumer market and GPU.