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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

#41

Post by ajross »

std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Q: Why is Intel charging so much? A: Because enough people pay. Q: Why do people pay so much? Why do they pay a high premium for top performance? A: Because, considering all factors, it's worth that much for them. For many it's too much but for many others it's ok. Q: But it's the same silicon! A: Manufacturing cost plays little role when the price is not dictated by a race to the bottom between different manufacture…

That's really not what the article is about at all. It's talking about the history of the tech industry and associating this kind of price motion with "peak" revenue for given hardware products.

Your same answer would apply to IBM's mainframes in 1990 and Sun's servers in 2001 too, and the point of the article is to associate Intel's current position with those products, which clearly reached peaks at those moments.

Personally I don't really buy it completely either, but quipping "because the market!" as an answer is missing the point. The article is about what that market desire means for future revenue.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#42

Post by colechristensen »

stu2010 wrote: post #10
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.

I'd bet that the cloud-scale customers like AWS negotiate pricing that has very little to do with the published list price of these CPUs.

More than that, Intel builds custom chips to AWS specs.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#43

Post by whipoodle »

std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Q: Why is Intel charging so much? A: Because enough people pay. Q: Why do people pay so much? Why do they pay a high premium for top performance? A: Because, considering all factors, it's worth that much for them. For many it's too much but for many others it's ok. Q: But it's the same silicon! A: Manufacturing cost plays little role when the price is not dictated by a race to the bottom between different manufacture…

I also am familiar with the concept of markets.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#44

Post by quickben »

BoorishBears wrote: post #22
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.

On another hand, in the cpu space, I went to top of the line Intel CPU overheating and throttling, to 8 core Ryzen, doing 45 celsius at 100 percent load and almost 4ghz across 8 cores.

Stuff like Intel unable to perform below 80 degrees on 4 cores, makes people switch with ease.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#45

Post by ethbro »

stu2010 wrote: post #10
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.

I'd bet that the cloud-scale customers like AWS negotiate pricing that has very little to do with the published list price of these CPUs.

And I think this is possibly one reason for the pricing. When a >50% (guessing, any better numbers?) of new chip sales volume comes from a few hyperscale buyers with individually negotiated contracts, you're far more flexible with what you do for the remainder.

Heck, Intel might even not really have the production volume on all SKUs to sell to non-hyperscale! And if that's true, then why would they do anything other than milk the few customers it deigns to sell to?

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#47

Post by Svenstaro »

yuhong wrote: post #4

I have been thinking about whether GitLab should buy the M versions that can do 1.5TB of RAM per socket with 128GB 3DS LR-DIMMs. They will probably not use them immediately though. Of course, I think the price gap between 64GB LR-DIMMs and 32GB RDIMMs are falling.

I thought Gitlab went back on the idea of using their own hardware anyway?

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#48

Post by paulmd »

wlesieutre wrote: post #14
gigatexal wrote: post #3

In an interesting (to me at least) move intel instead of competing on price when AMD put out a competitive offering they decided to keep prices the same more or less or increase them by adding value. Faster AVX units, more cores, more SKUs (not sure about that last one). And while intel has margins to maintain AMD has put features into their chips for years. For example AES has been shipping in most every desktop and…

I saw mentioned in another thread that all AMD processors support ECC RAM, provided you pick a motherboard that does it.

ECC is not an officially supported/validated feature on Ryzen. Support comes and goes across various motherboards and BIOS revisions and if it doesn't work you have no leg to stand on. Also, UDIMMs only, no RDIMMs.

It is officially supported on TR and Epyc, as well as Pentiums, i3s, and Xeons (entry-level Xeons are nowhere near as expensive as people think they are).

If you think you need ECC my advice is to build out around a platform where you won't be the first person to try something and run into the bugs. There is not a large community of ECC-users on Ryzen.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#49

Post by paulmd »

valarauca1 wrote: post #39
wlesieutre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

The product segmentation is basically for different markets, but also for process maturity. Mobile chips are very small, under powered, and under clocked. They get fabbed first. Then your core i3/i5/i7/E3's are all fabbed. As the process matures and can be expected to regularly handle 4GHz. Next your E5/E7's get ran, normally in a few waves. Your _enthusiast_/workstation cores are generally fabbed with E5/E7 engineer…

> Only Xeons offer ECC

> And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.

These statements are false, which you yourself acknowledge later in your post. You don't get credit for noting a caveat when the caveat is that your point is entirely false, at least in my book.

Intel no longer manufactures 2-core Xeons so Pentiums and i3s support ECC nowadays. This isn't uncommon, this has been the norm literally since they stopped making 2C Xeons (Haswell?).

And there are currently unlocked i3s in the lineup, just like there have been unlocked Pentiums in the past. It's the norm that Intel offers a barnburner overclockable SKU somewhere in the low end. They don't always, but they do it probably every other generation.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#50

Post by baq »

BoorishBears wrote: post #22
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.

> constant crashes, my desktop freezes when a video starts playing

my r9 270 started doing that and died completely (as in, stopped POSTing) a couple weeks later. i'd try to RMA.

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