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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

#181

Post by babypuncher »

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…

Market segmentation both raises and lowers prices. I don't think it is inherently bad. The low cost of entry level chips is only viable because of the high cost of premium chips. It is also critical in getting more viable chips out of your wafers, as defective parts of the silicon can be disabled and the chip placed in a lower SKU.

If you eliminate the market segmentation practices, then the price of the small number of remaining SKUs will regress to the mean. This may save wealthy buyers money as they get more features for less cash, but poor buyers get left out completely as they can no longer afford anything.

I do agree that Intel takes this to an absurd degree and should reign it in to a level more comparable to AMD. With ECC being mandatory in DDR5, I would expect all Intel chips to support it within a few years.

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

#182

Post by dragontamer »

javchz wrote: post #132
lvl100 wrote: post #25

Intel is NOT competing against AMD only. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips. Focusing on AMD would be quite myopic from a strategic pov. This market is only getting more competitive. Either you compete on performance or price.

Yeah, Custom ARM / RISC-V chips or even ASIC/FPGAs could start threatening x86/AMD64 for datacenters and "clouds" sooner than we think.

ARM maybe. But I'm not convinced that the ARM-alliance (Fujitsu, Apple, Ampere, Neoverse) is quite as unified as you might think. Apple has no apparent goals for cloud/servers, Fujitsu seems entirely focused on the Japanese market, and Ampere Altra isn't reaching critical mass (Amazon prefers a Neoverse rather than joining forces with Ampere / using Altra).

As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/investments won't really be as aligned as Xeon and/or EPYC servers.

HiFive / RISC-V aren't anywhere close to the server-tier.

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

#183

Post by dragontamer »

gleenn wrote: post #180
sdenton4 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out the Apple tax means you're also buying the three chips thrown away to produce your one...

That's not really an Apple tax though, that's a cost of doing business tax. It's not like Intel and AMD and everyone else aren't effectively doing the same exact thing.

Intel and AMD __literally__ sell those broken chips to the open marketplace, recouping at least some of the costs (or possibly getting a profit from them).

Apple probably does the same strategy PS3 did: create a 1-PPE + 8-SPE chip, but sell it as a 1-PPE + 7-SPE chip (assume one breaks). This increases yields, and it means that all 7-SPE + 8-SPE chips can be sold.

6-SPE-chips (and below) are thrown away, which is a small minority. Especially as the process matures and reliability of manufacturing increases over time.

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

#184

Post by pclmulqdq »

myself248 wrote: post #105
pclmulqdq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel and AMD are both like that, and it makes me wonder how much space they have opened up for ARM. I would love a small x86 SoC if it came with the same level of support that an NXP or TI ARM chip has, but they don't.

I wonder how a small outfit like UDOO manages to design around an AMD embedded part then. The boards are out there and they work, but I have no idea how the negotiations happened.

My impression is that if you are an open source project (especially one with a few already existing designs), you can actually get some design support from large companies. This is especially true if you either meet the right person in marketing at those companies or know someone on the inside. The Raspberry Pi uses chips from a very user-hostile company (Broadcom) because they started as a side project by a few engineers at Broadcom.

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

#185

Post by chippiewill »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #133
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…

It’s worth keeping in mind that the silicon lottery is very much a thing at these nanometer sizes. So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate. By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmen…

> Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmentation? No. They almost certainly disable, for example, hyperthreading on cores that support it - just for the segmentation.

I think even this is a bit unfair. Intel's segmentation is definitely still overkill, but it's worth bearing in mind that the cost of the product is not just the marginal cost of the materials and labour.

Most of the cost (especially for intel) is going to be upfront costs like R&D on the chip design, and the chip foundry process. I don't think it's unreasonable for Intel to be able to sell an artificially gimped processor at a lower price, because the price came out of thin air in the first place.

The point at which this breaks is when Intel doesn't have any real competition and uses segmentation as a way to raise prices on higher end chips rather than as a way to create cheaper SKUs.

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

#186

Post by inasio »

minhazm wrote: post #166
alexhawke wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple produces one A series chip for the iPhones every year. How does that work?

Look at the Apple A12x. They disabled a GPU core in it for the iPad, and then in the A12z they enabled that core. This was likely to help with yields. Then with the M1 chips they decided to sell a 7 core version of the chip with the base level Macbook Air and save the 8 core version for the higher trims. Even Apple is susceptible to it. But Apple doesn't sell chips, they sell devices and they can eat the cost for som…

The M1 (ok, in the 7 and 8 GPU core configurations) is in the Macbook air, Macbook pro, Ipad, Imac, and Mac mini...

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #151
dev_tty01 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amoral? Why? They advertise a two core part, you pay for a two core part, you get a two core part. Completely fair.

Because if they're capable of making plenty of good 4-cores but have more demand for 2-cores so are cutting good 4c, they should just make the 4-cores a little cheaper. But maybe they already do this. Anyways, agreed ECC should be standard, but it requires an extra die and most people can do fine without it, so it probably won't happen. But an ECC CPU option with clearly marketed consumer full ECC RAM would be nice.…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by jvanderbot »

inetknght wrote: post #140
colejohnson66 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the silicon lottery is very much a thing at these nanometer sizes. So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate. By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmen…

> By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense. Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged. Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.

That's not amoral. It's missing a market opportunity, but conflating that with morality is an interesting way of looking at it.

Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something. They will suffer when someone else offers what you want and you leave. That's the point of markets and competition.

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

#189

Post by chippiewill »

nevi-me wrote: post #52

For the eventual consumers of the servers at the discounted prices: are we going to see the price decrease benefits? If say GCP/AWS/Azure decide to build a DC in a new region, and they go blue primarily because of the discounts, would the pricing end up being slightly smaller than otherwise? I can understand that electricity, cooling and other costs would have an influence; but I'm wondering whether performance & pri…

> and they go blue primarily because of the discounts, would the pricing end up being slightly smaller than otherwise?

I don't know about the others, but AWS already has different prices for ec2 for AMD vs Intel vs ARM. It's not a case of "going blue", they'll support anything that people will pay them for. Pricing tends to be dictated more by power usage than by hardware cost.

For non-directly-ec2 backed services (like ECS and s3, as opposed to say RDS) I'd guess they'd go all in on ARM regardless for the power savings.

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

#190

Post by b9a2cab5 »

zamadatix wrote: post #72
gtirloni wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tangible benefits are you getting from choosing AMD now? Honest question as I'm curious if there's another benefit besides price (which Intel is fighting now).

Most stuff eventually turns into cost so I'll ignore "costly" effects like heat/power and performance per dollar and focus on max performance scale for workloads and other unique differences not achievable via just throwing more money at the alternative. Per socket performance scaling is higher for equivalent tier sockets. At hyperscale that goes back into the price benefit (buy and maintain less physical data center…

For non-NUMA aware workloads with high inter-core coordination (for example, a write heavy database workload) Intel will still perform much better because the cross-chiplet latency of EPYC chips is very high. Going through the IO die and to another chip is about as expensive as going to main memory.

Hyperscalers are running web servers which is a different story. But if you're running web servers you might be better off with Graviton in perf/$.

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