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The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

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Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#21

Post by fragmede »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #8

With the concentration of server buying by AWS I am surprised Intel believes it can get away with this. AWS has the expertise and the incentive to push for supporting a competitor that offers a superior value.

Given AwS's leadership in being the world's datacenter, they must purchase enough Intel CPUs to have some say, so I'm surprised we haven't seen Amazon offer of CPUs clocked at 10 GHz.

Home users don't have liquid nitrogen piped into their homes or even really the expertise for hot vs. code aisles, but AWS is building their own datacenters, at which point they could pipe liquid nitrogen in if they chose to. At the scale and concentration to AWS is building at, I certainly hope it leads to faster computers, if not bigger AWS bills.

The way I recall, AWS had to be embarrassed into offering GPU instances rather than taking the lead in, so maybe there's a competitor out there building for speed.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#22

Post by BoorishBears »

throw2016 wrote: post #20

Most markets feel comfortable and safe with Intel. AMD will have to go through the tough adoption curve of early adopters to mature markets and while this happens Intel has relatively free reign with their pricing and value. Markets with long established leaders have the additional burden of too many vested interests, misinformation and dirty tricks. However if AMD continues to deliver the naysayers will eventually l…

AMD fans like to separate RTG from AMD, but anecdotally, I just got a Vega 64 GPU and it's horrible. Loud, constant crashes, my desktop freezes when a video starts playing, etc.

Stuff like that makes me unwilling to go with AMD when I have a choice. I view them as offering competitive performance on paper but completely falling short when it comes to reliability.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#23

Post by kbumsik »

Retric wrote: post #7
imtringued wrote: post #5

Server CPUs are way too cheap compared to the remaining parts of the server. Paying 10% more in exchange for software compatibility is a steal.

What software compatibility issue?

At least there are some linux kernal support issues on AMD Ryzen and Threadreaper CPUs for now.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#25

Post by tengbretson »

douglasfshearer wrote: post #17
simias wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong but I assume that there's enough inertia in the high-end business-to-business side of things (the part that matters for high-end server processors) that they probably can keep milking that cow for a few years more. People who have only been buying Intel CPU in the last decade won't jump ship immediately. Nobody gets fired for buying Intel CPUs, at least until very recently. You know you won't have co…

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.

And yet there are still people out there buying IBM and somehow not getting fired for it.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#26

Post by gaius »

Xorlev wrote: post #11
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software compatibility issue?

Different CPUs perform subtly different. Not to mention that server-class workloads tend to expose bugs and architectural shortfalls. Ryzen hasn't had great press in this regard, so decision makers are going to regard AMD with some skepticism to begin with. It's about risk: you know Intel chips roughly perform as they always have, just a little better each generation. Additionally, if you rely on Intel's compiler to…

What's a server class workload in this context?

Remember that Intel's embarrassing FDIV bug was spotted in Excel...

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#27

Post by tylerjd »

coredog64 wrote: post #18
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software compatibility issue?

Not the OP, but maybe he's talking about the kernel panic that some users are getting during heavy-duty compilation workloads. https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...

Newer steppings of Ryzen have a fix applied, and AMD is allowing people to RMA those processors affected. Threadripper is unaffected by the bug.

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryze...

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#28

Post by dis-sys »

coredog64 wrote: post #18
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software compatibility issue?

Not the OP, but maybe he's talking about the kernel panic that some users are getting during heavy-duty compilation workloads. https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...

there is no kernel panic whatsoever. the mentioned issue causes some of your GCC parallel compilation jobs to fail, everything happens in user level. This issue is caused by manufacturing, not by design, it has been fully addressed in recent batches.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#29

Post by wlesieutre »

frozenport wrote: post #19
fish_fan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This alone could save you thousands.

Not really. Low-end Xeons with ECC cost >$300.

Sure, but with a $300 budget on Intel you're choosing between an i7-7700K or a Xeon E3-1245v6, which are all but identical.

The Xeon has a slightly higher base clock, slightly lower turbo (all clocks are changed by 0.1 GHz), ECC, and a locked clock multiplier. It appears to benchmark consistently a couple of percent below the i7.

What's even the point of that product segmentation existing? To annoy their customers? I'd rather just buy a $300 processor that checks all the feature boxes instead of all but one.

http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_e3_1245_...

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#30

Post by dman »

kbumsik wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software compatibility issue?

At least there are some linux kernal support issues on AMD Ryzen and Threadreaper CPUs for now.

There is a fix for Ryzen in newly shipping chips which fixes the gcc compilation issue on Linux. From what I understand if you are facing the issue you can contact AMD and they will ship you a new chip without the issue. ThreadRipper / Epyc never suffered from the issue.
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