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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

#61

Post by paulmd »

fish_fan wrote: post #16
wlesieutre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This alone could save you thousands.

Sure, if you're tinkering at home where the stakes are low and your time is free. You can also save a bunch of money running Xeon engineering samples.

But if your production environment goes tits-up then your savings go out the window and a whole lot more besides. And that's what you're risking by running a hardware configuration that is non-validated/unsupported.

People constantly make the mistake of assuming that businesses need to pinch pennies on their money-generating assets, just like they do on the rigs they use for entertainment at home. In the business world, reliability and official support trump an extra $1k in your pocket every time.

Forget Xeons entirely: there are still a lot of customers who buy Sun/Oracle/IBM hardware even though it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. $1k does not even register for a lot of businesses.

(ECC is validated on Epyc, of course - but the prices are a lot closer to Xeons there, it's no longer a slam-dunk. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis to determine which is actually a better deal for your workload. And frankly AMD has been doing an undue amount of massaging on their benchmarks here, like in their launch data where they just straight-up removed 43% from all the Intel benchmarks. )

http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus...

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#62

Post by yourapostasy »

tengbretson wrote: post #25
douglasfshearer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Available software constraints choices in many of those cases. Put two choices in front of an application team exec: rewrite and port an application from POWER/AIX, POWER/System i, POWER/System z for $X million, with all the attending risks that entails. Or spend same $X million on new IBM hardware, and get more capacity, performance, etc., while the system administrators/system programmers update the underlying OS, with lower magnitude of risks and impacts, and if the sysadmins screw up, that's another department, not yours, anyways. Even if porting is a one-time charge, and saves Y * $X million in N years (where N usually The choice to avoid risk is easy.

This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered.

If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#63

Post by jandrese »

kinghajj wrote: post #56
jandrese wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so simple when you want to buy server quality motherboards.

Do these not count? https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/AMD_SP3.cfm

Possibly, assuming they make something that fits your needs. The market is really shallow at the moment.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#64

Post by mtgx »

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 not always the case. Sometimes monopolies are born and the companies charge more money out of arrogance that there isn't anyone out there that can "truly" compete with them. But that same arrogance is often what ends up bringing them down.

See Nokia and BlackBerry's arrogance in relation to the rise of the iPhone. They were still charging similar or higher prices than the iPhone for their flagships a few years after the iPhone first appeared, and with no touch features to speak of or anything close to an iPhone experience.

The inertia of success definitely plays a role. For instance, BlackBerry was logically concluding that they "must be doing something right" a few years after the iPhone came out because their financials still looked pretty great, due mainly to the global expansion (the iPhone wasn't in that many countries at first, and Android still had single digit market share). So that's how they rationalized keeping their high non-competitive prices.

I assume something similar is going on at Intel. They continue seeing a large influx of server buyers even with AMD's EPYC being out because of inertia - customers already deciding to buy Xeons in 2017 a few years ago - like say Google which bragged so much about being the first to get a Xeon Skylake. So Intel rationalizes this as "having no reason to reduce its prices, and in fact it could even increase them since it sees so much demand!"

But that logic is going to hurt them a few years from now, when AMD or perhaps some ARM competitors like Qualcomm start becoming more established in the market and they've had a few years of "people hearing good things about their products." Right now the new AMD and ARM chips are untested and the majority of companies like to play it safe.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#65

Post by xenadu02 »

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.

Until your single-source vendor decides to turn up the heat. Realistically if Intel doubled all prices tomorrow most enterprise customers would just pay it.

The huge cloud vendors should be buying and deploying AMD systems right now to ensure that never happens; it doesn't matter if there are some kinks to iron out. As an insurance policy it is very cheap.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#66

Post by CSDude »

Svenstaro wrote: post #47
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?

They can't even manage the managed servers, it has issues too many times

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#67

Post by dijit »

abakker wrote: post #55
tengbretson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?

Systems Engineer here;

Absolutely.

Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc;

The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run:

A) Windows

B) Full Disk Encryption

TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#68

Post by snuxoll »

kinghajj wrote: post #56
jandrese wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so simple when you want to buy server quality motherboards.

Do these not count? https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/AMD_SP3.cfm

The other issue is buying the chips themselves, they're only available to OEM partners right now AFAICT (not listed on Newegg or anywhere else I'd expect to be able to buy retail boxed server CPUs).

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#69

Post by RockyMcNuts »

agumonkey wrote: post #57
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…

btw it there a name for studying the value of "price" ? or is it just economics ? the history of the difference between cost (material, employees) and sale price.

Price theory. Microeconomics… which is largely how a single actor makes a decision, whether to buy something or where to set a price, and how that leads to market equilibria when many people do that in some utility-maximizing manner.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#70

Post by gigatexal »

dijit wrote: post #67
abakker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?

Systems Engineer here; Absolutely. Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc; The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run: A) Windows B) Full Disk Encryption TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.

So, um, ... what happened to those now "useless" servers. Wondering for a friend ;-)
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