The server market is like Formula One for chip makers. It is where there is enough money to really push the limits of the technology. Competing in such leagues brings institutional knowledge, and bragging rights.

Servers is also where you get back-and-forth discussions with customers large enough to be worth listening to. Getting useful feedback from the users of desktop CPUs is difficult and time-consuming. But someone like Facebook or Google, who buy thousands of CPUs, and know how to use them, can give you quick and reliable feedback. They can test prototypes and suggest changes within weeks.

Threadripper doesn't target servers, their EPYC line does...

> Why does threadripper need to be competitive in the server space?

It doesn't, and AMD doesn't market Threadripper for server use. It only came up in this discussion because of a misunderstanding of Threadripper's capabilities.

Because laptop CPUs don't make any money, and gaming PCs are so small a market as to be irrelevant. The bulk of x86 revenue, and almost all the profit, is in the datacenter.

Right. But threadripper isn’t AMD’s server processor, and EPYC is eating Intel’s lunch.