Processor Choice Matters for VDI Economics

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Servers powered by AMD EPYC® processors can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and cost per user for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments compared to those running competing processors.

Increasing numbers of employees started working remotely during 2020. That switch has forced IT organizations to elevate remote-productivity solutions—such as VDI— as a priority. As VDI grows in operational importance for organizations, TCO and cost questions, in addition to availability and security concerns, have grown more prominent for IT.

Evaluation by Prowess Consulting shows that the foundation that powers servers— their processors—can have an outsized impact on VDI deployment cost. Our evaluation shows that building VDI systems around AMD EPYC® processors rather than Intel® Xeon® processors can reduce three-year server TCO by as much as 68 percent, and it can decrease the cost per user per month by as much as 59 percent. Just in terms of power consumption and cooling, the servers powered by AMD EPYC processors that we evaluated were 44 to 53 percent more efficient than those powered by Intel Xeon processors.

Beyond the cost factors, AMD EPYC processors provide reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features, in addition to security capabilities, which can increase server uptime and help protect data on virtual desktops. Independent of the processors powering them, the Lenovo® servers examined in this study also have additional performance, reliability, and customer-satisfaction features that can qualitatively improve VDI deployments for IT organizations and that can help reduce the complexity of the server infrastructure that undergirds such deployments.

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