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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

#91

Post by sliken »

BoorishBears wrote: post #54
quickben wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

The top of the line Intel CPU comparable to an 8 core Ryzen CPU is probably the 7700k, which has a higher absolute power draw "ceiling", but also has better performance and higher clocks to match. I think Intel's value based on performance isn't good compared to Ryzen, but the product isn't inherently flawed, and that combined with AMD's shaky history is enough to keep myself, and lots of people I know from switching…

7700k seems kinda overpriced. Why not pay $40 more for the i7-7800X and get 50% more cores and double the memory bandwidth/channels?

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#92

Post by filereaper »

sigzero wrote: post #76
yourapostasy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Port away from? We moved everything TO POWER/AIX.

If its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#93

Post by ajross »

nwatson wrote: post #90
pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example missing in the article was the graphics workstations with SGI.

I remember considering spending lots of student-budget money in 1993 for an SGI Indy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy ), a low-end graphics workstation from SGI. I think this was shortly before peak-SGI. I'm glad I didn't, because (a) PCs started to see impressive graphics performance improvements not so longer after; (b) I went to industry and ended up working in enterprise software instead. SGI market cap p…

Exactly, and for pretty much the same reason. Once CMOS prices got to the point where 3D graphics acceleration (not SGI's only core competency, but pretty close revenue-wise) was desired at consumer volume, they were toast. NVIDIA had they beat on almost everything that mattered by 1998 or so.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#94

Post by klodolph »

colechristensen wrote: post #42
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.

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

Kind of. From what I understand, any customer large enough can get small features added, and they just get turned off for the other customers.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#95

Post by dom0 »

bsder wrote: post #83
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

One thing missing from the comparison to IBM and Sun is that precisely because those companies made things so expensive people started looking for alternatives. The ES/9000's were really good machines for the time. Had IBM not raped people on those, companies might have stuck with them for a little longer. The AS/400 was priced more reasonably and people loved those. You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to…

I own two SPARC servers (a 2003ish V245 and a 2007 T5120) and both are rather ridiculous ... idle power draw for a V245 is like 240 W and just 150-180 W of that are the fans. [1] A T5120 draws some 180 W idle as well. Especially the latter was also heavily marketed as green computing / efficient data centres / throughput computing. Completely ridiculous offering at the time.

Needless to say, I didn't even bother to set these up lest build a rack for them (my normal rack is both full and too short). If packaging weren't so annoying with computer servers I would've sold them long ago.

[1] The good stuff. High static pressure, high flow fans from Delta with ball-bearings, and of course only speed monitoring, no regulation. These Sun servers make for excellent magnet boards for holding papers just without using any magnets.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#96

Post by kazinator »

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…

Now is the only time you can charge premium for new chips. Nobody will pay that in a year or two. In five years it's on Craigslist, and in ten, it's ancient crap you find on motherboards pulled from machines thrown into the dumpster.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#97

Post by 24gttghh »

wlesieutre wrote: post #29
frozenport wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 once heard there is certain mentality that when given more options, more people end up making purchases where they otherwise would not. For instance, if you have one fast food chain along a short stretch of road, less people will go to that one location than if there were multiple, competing chains in the same area.

I believe this is called agglomeration[0][1], and may have parallels beyond physical, competing stores, into realms like similar, but differently named CPU's.

[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098017694131 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

edit: rplst8 mentions binning, and that seems like another likely factor as well.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#98

Post by dom0 »

rocqua wrote: post #38
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?…

Best I can come up with is binning. Maybe some CPU's fail on the ECC front, so they sell those as 7700 and up the factory boost clock to compensate and 'market to consumers'. Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?

The memory ECC is a tiny bit of logic right next to all other memory logic in the MC, it seems very far fetched to me that there would be a binning process for specifically the instance of that logic being broke but the data logic next door working just fine.

Note that the ECC on the processor's internal data buses and caches is completely independent of whatever ECC the memory controller may or may not use.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#99

Post by Klinky »

paulmd wrote: post #49
valarauca1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stopp…

There has been one Pentium and i3 that are unlocked since the start of the Nehalem era.

What's up with the i3-6320 supporting ECC but the i3-7320 no longer supporting it? Intel is at the least, very inconsistent with ECC on the consumer side.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#100

Post by magila »

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 suspect Intel is not too worried about AMD because they've seen this script before. When AMD's Opteron server CPUs came out they offered vastly superior performance and scaleability compared to contemporary Xeons. Even with a clear technical advantage, AMD never came close to matching Intel's volume in the server market.

Today, AMD's Eypc CPUs are a much closer match to their Xeon competitors than Opteron was. So if history is anything to go by, Intel has little to fear from AMD's latest efforts.

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