Live data from Hacker News

The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

nextplatform.com

101–110 of 159 posts

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#101
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#102
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel agreed to license the x86 to AMD decades ago, it is the precondition to allow Intel to avoid being sued to bankruptcy for monopoly. For current software, the current arch is called AMD64 for a reason - the mentioned compatibility is built entirely on AMD inventions.

Not only to avoid enforcement, but also because some customers will only select products where a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source is also selling them.

Well that's stretching the meaning of second sourcing quite a lot. Normally it means that you can get an exact replacement part from someone else. For example, industry standard things like nuts, bolts, ball bearings, SRAM and DRAM (most stuff specced by JEDEC) can be sourced from many sources. There is literally no difference at all between a M8×20 8.8 bolt between manufacturer A and B. Similarly, if you have a design with a LM358 (a non-standardised part), then there are multiple manufacturers that will sell you a part with identical specs under a slightly different name or even the same name.

This is also the way it started with x86 and other second-sourceable processors. An Intel 8086 and an AMD 8086 are drop-in compatible. This is not the case with modern processors, they don't even fit the same sockets.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#103
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real-world power consumption between the 6950X and the 1800X aren't supposed to be terribly different either. What did you measure before and after? https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/amd-ryzen-1800x-and-am... https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R... > Why the cynism? Because in performance and efficiency Ryzen is basically equivalent with Haswell-E/Broadwell-E. The sole advantage it has is…

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9959/samsung-announces-14lpp-m... https://semiaccurate.com/2016/09/01/intel-finally-narrows-14...

I think you might have forgotten to type a post to go with those links.

Later iterations of Ryzen are undoubtedly going to fix some of the teething issues (segfaults, memory clocks, etc), and probably get the clocks up too. But they will also be going up against Coffee Lake and others - Intel can iterate on their products too.

Consumer Ryzen is basically just Haswell with an AMD sticker on it, and it's just so transparently fake to see all the fanboys cooing over a product they wouldn't even give the time of day to when it was released under an Intel badge. It's an incremental improvement on pricing, but not really that drastic except in a few special cases (the 8C and 10C Intel processors had very steep pricing).

As it's on a newer stepping with a better platform and fully-validated ECC support, Epyc is much more interesting product to me. But it's also a market that doesn't care about throwing money at the problem if that's what it takes to get performance/stability - there are plenty of companies who are not even using COTS hardware let alone off-brand.

Also, bear in mind that "nm" measurements are pure marketing. It's now the spacing between features that determines total density, not feature size. Intel is at least a full node ahead of everyone else in density, even if others claim to have "14nm" nodes.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#104

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#105
post #93
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember when my scientician friends started switching from SGI to multiple super-beefed-up Dells in the early 2000's. They could get five monster custom Dell machines for the price of one Octane or Indigo or whatever. And they delivered better performance. (Or so they told me.)

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#106

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.

Sometimes IBM are better than the alternative. Hard to believe in the HN bubble, I know, but there you are.

(The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#107
post #100

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 i…

AMD wasn't able to match Intel's volume because Intel engaged in outright bribery of PC and server vendors on a impressively massive scale (they literally paid out hundreds of millions per year — and that's just to one vendor — as an incentive not to buy AMD). Other factors obviously didn't help, but this was clearly a huge one.

Given they've been slapped down for this, I wonder if they'll try it again. If they don't, AMD could have an easier go this time round.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#108
post #9
post #2

Simple, buy AMD

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

Exactly. If you just sit and play games and don't care if your computer kernel panics and don't care if bits flip in your memory (with no ECC) then AMD is for you!

But if you're doing real work, don't bother.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#109

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.

Vega 56 and 64 would be decent, but AMD basically overclocked them way too far past the point of diminishing returns out of the box, in order to make them, on paper, beat the GTX 1070 and 1080 respectively. If put on a power-saver profile, they're suddenly much more respectable. But AMD keep gambling that a loud, power-hungry and hot by default card will do well if it narrowly beats the closest NVidia card in benchmarks. They should perhaps stop making this gamble.

Or so this guy claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AavuWT17X48. Seems to be borne out by reviewers' general impressions though.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.

I don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.
Post reply on HN