The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

Post by tachyonbeam » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #45

stu2010 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by Svenstaro » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

CSDude wrote: post #66

Svenstaro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by jsolson » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #6

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 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…

Post by free652 » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

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.

Post by calimac » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #41

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.…