The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons • Hacker News Board

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#121

Post by temac » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #107

magila wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't completely understand the "need" for bribery. Could they just not lower their prices? (which could have resulted in the same balance in the end)

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#122

Post by temac » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 11:57 PM UTC

dom0 wrote: post #102

concede_pluto wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

But you can change a larger module. If you want to cover that kind of risk with that kind of supplier companies (hint: a marginal risk, to begin with), you are not going to go anal about the drop it characteristics of single chips. Or at least you should not, IMO.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#123

Post by temac » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 11:59 PM UTC

gsnedders wrote: post #117

klodolph wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the feature, as far as I can tell. Intel has been known to do entirely custom chips, if the price is right (and realistically, you need lots of volume to be able to justify the setup cost of it).

If we are talking about modern processors, I doubt they are going to do custom masks.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#124

Post by temac » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 12:03 AM UTC

quickben wrote: post #72

paulmd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I went to top of the line Intel CPU overheating and throttling Frankly I've never heard of a 6950X overheating and throttling, the lid is soldered on those processors. Sounds like a personal problem.

I wasn't taking about the lid. The raw thermal output is different under a full non-transient load. Why the cynism?

If you change the thermal resistance, you can very well overheat or not with the same constant TDP.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#125

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 12:16 AM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #109

BoorishBears wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benchma…

What I've seen points more towards Vega 56 actually not being a bad value all things considered.

But Vega 64 is overvolted severely to get to the 1080's level of performance so it runs hot and loud. Some people have been able to undervolt their cards until they reached reasonable power draw for the performance level, but AMD wouldn't set a high voltage for no reason, implying they did it to improve what percentage of their yield could be shipped as Vega 64

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#126

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 12:26 AM UTC

sliken wrote: post #91

BoorishBears wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plenty of reasons:

Higher base clock on the 7700k, biggest reason for entertainment alongside:

Higher OC potential (back in the 4790k days 5Ghz on air was something else, for the 7700k not getting 5Ghz is considered "losing the silicon lottery")

Cheapest 7800X motherboard is 100$ more than cheapest 7700k motherboards (which are still quite good) because X299 is a HEDT platform

Most entertainment machines won't benefit from quad channel over dual channel in a meaningful way.

The 7700k is generally regarded as the fastest gaming CPU available, that's why so many benchmarks use it. I'm pretty sure AMD used it to showcase Vega because even if it becomes a bottleneck, no other CPU on the market can be "less of a bottneck"

And I'll add, this is all with my entertainment/gaming hat on.

For a dev machine where I'd expect to work with compiled languages or compiling OSes I'd definitely go with more cores.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#127

Post by dieterrams » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 12:43 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #78

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, does this include the psychological effect of price ? selling at 0$ doesn't mean people will grab it, they might assume it's crap. Thanks nonetheless to both you.

Behavioral economics.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#128

Post by fish_fan » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 1:06 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #61

fish_fan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

A fair point, and well articulated!

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#129

Post by dboreham » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

temac wrote: post #121

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't completely understand the "need" for bribery. Could they just not lower their prices? (which could have resulted in the same balance in the end)

I think you're confused about "couldn't match their volume". Parent means (I think) that AMD couldn't _sell_ enough units. Not that they couldn't _make_ enough units (which is I think your interpretation).

They couldn't sell enough because someone was paying their customers not to buy their (superior) product.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#130

Post by protomyth » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 1:21 AM UTC

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…

> You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to a Unix workstation if you used a nuclear bomb.

Still can’t. The new bottom end model (iSeries) is cheaper (sub 10k) and will last for another 10 years until a new one is needed. The place I work is buying a new one because it is hitting the end of support (damn thing was bought before 2008). No problems that lasted more than a couple of hours in all that time.