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Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

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Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#121

Post by apetrovic »

awestroke wrote: post #113
KronisLV wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. After all, making your consumers buy the more expensive versions of your product just because they need one of its features is a sound business decision. Otherwise people will use the cheaper and lower end versions if they only need these features - like i'm currently using 200GEs for my…

Well, now they are losing to AMD, so what does that tell you about it being a sound busineas decision?

They aren't losing to AMD because of market segmentation, they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#122

Post by freemint »

hiram112 wrote: post #102

> As seen in renowned system distributor Puget Systems' statistics, AMD has risen from a 5% share in systems sold since June 2020, up to a dominating 60% as of June 2021. Wow, maybe this stat is misleading or only referring to some small segment of the market, but if not, that is an incredible loss for Intel in just a single year.

Puget Systems is a smallish boutique seller that builds you the best computer for a certain workload given some benchmarks. It's niche but they are an indicator what is better for the workloads of their customer.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#123

Post by tw04 »

KronisLV wrote: post #111
tw04 wrote: post #103

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…

I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. After all, making your consumers buy the more expensive versions of your product just because they need one of its features is a sound business decision. Otherwise people will use the cheaper and lower end versions if they only need these features - like i'm currently using 200GEs for my…

>I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen.

The only reason it hasn't happened is because they had no legitimate competition until recently. In a healthy market they would have been forced to do so long ago. Capitalism and "market forces" only work where competition exists.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#124

Post by minimaul »

ashtonkem wrote: post #109
swalsh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.

I’ve been eyeing Graviton for our server work loads. On paper it’s price competitive.

We’ve been moving more and more to it. It works, and surprisingly well. It’s not quite up there for absolute single thread performance in our experience, but price/perf is excellent.

edit: really, I’m just waiting for Graviton 2 Fargate support, and then I’ll be able to move a lot of workloads.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#125

Post by cge »

tambourine_man wrote: post #73
dbatten wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who (like me) didn't get the "toothpaste company" reference - it seems to be a reference to Intel trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of an old architecture (as one would squeeze every bit of toothpaste out of a tube), rather than innovating with new architectures and technologies. It's hard to figure out exactly where the toothpaste reference originated, but at least one source makes it sou…

I think the parent meant an anecdote I've heard many times, in slightly different ways. It goes like this: a major toothpaste company was having a meeting, trying to increase sales. Many solutions were tried: new flavors, advertising, none had much effect. On a whim, a director asks the guy serving coffee: - Jack, what would you do to increase sales? - Have you tried increasing the hole on the toothpaste? There might…

I had also heard a point for toothpaste involving the marketing: toothpaste advertisements, and all marketing imagery of toothpaste on a toothbrush, almost always show absurdly larger amounts of toothpaste than is effective or appropriate to use brushing teeth, trying to increase consumption by increasing waste.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#126

Post by lotsofpulp »

apetrovic wrote: post #121
awestroke wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, now they are losing to AMD, so what does that tell you about it being a sound busineas decision?

They aren't losing to AMD because of market segmentation, they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC.

Hence they can no longer afford to do the market segmentation.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#127

Post by Consultant32452 »

tw04 wrote: post #103

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…

This is very common across many industries. It doesn't cost much more to manufacture a sports car vs a sedan, but the price is very different.

No product is based on the price of manufacture, it's based on the price people are willing to pay.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#128

Post by MarkSweep »

codeflo wrote: post #84
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Microsoft could fix their frankly horrid x86 compatibility on aarch64 device I don't think Microsoft is the real problem there, though. NT was developed to be portable and was working on architectures other than x86 in the beginning. So it was interesting when I heard things about "Windows on ARM" half a decade ago--and then the Surface RT. The RT was crap, but it did have real Windows NT working on non-Intel AR…

I'm not so optimistic. There are some technical things Microsoft did poorly when going from x86 to x86-64, which in my opinion delayed the transition of a lot of software by a decade. And this is with processors that can run both instruction sets natively, where no actual software emulation was required. To give some context (this started with Windows Server 2003 64-bit and is still how it works in Windows 11): Inste…

Microsoft announced ARM64EC. It’s an ABI for ARM64 that is similar to x64. They say it allows mixing x64 and ARM64 DLLs in the same process.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/28/announ...

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#129

Post by polskibus »

xuki wrote: post #114
tw04 wrote: post #103

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…

Yeah, I've switched to AMD Ryzen 5k for my dedicated servers. They're faster and cheaper than Xeon, they support ECC which is the only reasons I need Xeon previously.

Higher end Ryzens along with NVMe make for great high performance CI local worker nodes.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#130

Post by StillBored »

IshKebab wrote: post #107
woofie11 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one more issue is support. If I want a chip from TI, Analog Devices, etc., I fill out a web form and get a sample. If I want to talk to an engineer, I place a phone call. If I want to order a dozen of a part, I go to Digikey. If I want a datasheet, it's online. Intel won't give you the time of day unless you're HP or Dell. That's optimal for capitalizing on old markets, but it means it's never in new markets.…

> If I want to talk to an engineer, I place a phone call. If I want to order a dozen of a part, I go to Digikey. If I want a datasheet, it's online. I notice you didn't list Broadcom... And bullshit can you call an engineer. Submit a support case through some online portal maybe. Zero chance they are giving you a direct line to their engineers.

Yah they are all like that, in the arm space outside of really low end devices and the rk3399 they won't even give you minimal register docs for standard devices. I had problems at the previous place trying to build a PCIe device where the minimum to to even get the most minimal of documentation was 100k units. Sure you could buy the parts from digikey but they were useless because the public docs were little more than footprints and high level whitepaper like feature matrices.
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