The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

Post by ddingus » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 3:16 AM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #138

dboreham wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think temac was suggesting Intel could sell cheaper chips. Why would Intel need to bribe the competition?

Post by selectodude » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 3:36 AM UTC

powercf wrote: post #139

selectodude wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be ridiculous, but I'm not spending a million dollars on CPUs with information gleamed from a forum post.

It's not ridiculous, but there's pratically no more information about it. No major tech sites have covered it, beyond Phoronix. AMD haven't acknowledged it, beyond stating that "a performance marginality problem exclusive to certain workloads on Linux" exists, which is factually incorrect as it also seems to occur on other operating systems. I'm not spending hundreds of euro on a processor without knowing something m…

Post by klodolph » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 4:25 AM 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).

Post by moonbug22 » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 7:01 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…

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 11:44 AM UTC

yourapostasy wrote: post #113

sigzero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, I've seen that, too. There are some use cases where IBM still excels. There is a popular perception that IBM is a has-been dinosaur, especially with the System z (mainframe) stuff, but I still haven't heard that Visa International has moved even one of their three world-wide super data centers off of that platform. The Linux world could avoid reinventing a lot of wheels in the future looking to the lessons IBM h…