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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

#291

Post by pdimitar »

scandinavian wrote: post #14
rcthompson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "AMD's chips", they clearly meant chips marketed and sold under AMD's brand. If you're trying to make the point that TSMC deserves the real credit for competing with Intel, then just say that.

You don't think it's important to make the distinction between chip design and manufacturing? Intel has clearly failed with regards to manufacturing new nodes, but is the chip design really that bad when they could compete for a long time with a large node disadvantage?

They almost never competed in the dictionary sense of the word, historically. They have plenty of shady tactics to gain more market share. Assuming that the "free market" works -- or that it even exists -- is way too charitable and optimistic of you.

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

#292

Post by FridayoLeary »

cge wrote: post #125
tambourine_man wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another explanation could be that advertisers are trying to increase the visibility of the product being sold.

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

#293

Post by deckard1 »

tw04 wrote: post #245
deckard1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to note, AMD does every single thing you blame Intel for. AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a…

>AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a year after they put it out. And they stated their reasoning: T…

> The average AMD 400 Series motherboard has key technical advantages over the average AMD 300 Series motherboard, including: VRM configuration, memory trace topology, and PCB layers

So AMD told you that? And yet you don't call that market segmentation? Come on now. Lose the double standard already. AsRock (and I think Asus or Gigabyte?) has proven the b350/x370 chipset works fine with 5000 series CPUs. People have tested it and are using it just fine. VRMs are up to the motherboard. Why are you letting AMD dictate what motherboard manufacturers want to support here?

> look at the quality of the average X370 motherboard compared to 400+

Uh, what? The x370 is at a higher tier than b450. There are many b450 boards that are straight garbage (and let's be honest, garbage MBs stretch across all chipsets). The difference between a b350 and b450 is vanishingly tiny.

I'm baffled that people really think 300/400/500 series matter. You can run Zen 1 on b550/x570 despite AMD not wanting you to. You can't claim VRM/memory trace/PCB there. The only real limitation that I can tell is physical BIOS RAM capacity.

> Which Ryzen model doesn't have SMT?

The Ryzen 3, of course. Not that I meant literally all the steps Intel took AMD also took. But what the hell do you think the "X" series of Ryzen chips are? Or Threadripper and EPYC? It's all market segmentation. The Ryzen 5 is just the 7 with cores disabled. Why are you picking certain features as "segmentation" over others? It makes no sense.

> As for ECC: I don't believe I said they're perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what Intel has to offer...

How? Just so you know I spent literally months researching everything I've stated in this thread just so I could put together a Ryzen system with ECC. With Xeon I could have been done in a day.

Gigabyte allows ECC RAM to operate, but forces it into non-ECC mode thereby working as normal RAM. Good luck figuring out what MSI is doing. Asus, who the hell really knows. Their website spec sheet lists "ECC supported" and the manual for each specific motherboard says something entirely different.

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

#294

Post by [deleted] »

tw04 wrote: post #245
deckard1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to note, AMD does every single thing you blame Intel for. AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a…

>AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a year after they put it out. And they stated their reasoning: T…

[deleted]

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

#295

Post by shadilay »

jandrese wrote: post #233
adamweld wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13% is huge in a low margin, highly competitive field. the price difference comes down more to economies of scale and less to artificial segmentation.

It is 13% of one of the cheaper components. Back in the 80s when all memory was expensive there was something of an excuse, but today we are needlessly trading the possibility for silent corruption over the multi-year lifetime of the machine for a couple of coffees. And worse, we make it really expensive and difficult for people who do want to reduce their risk by artificially segmenting the market.

Back in the 80s the need for ECC was much less because the gates were physically bigger and there was much less overall memory. Back then the chance of your computer having a bit flip was like one in a million per year, now with gigabytes of memory it's near 100% chance per year.

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

#296

Post by smoldesu »

monocasa wrote: post #264
Hikikomori wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe read a bit about Graviton? AllIntel/AMD instances in AWS has Graviton processors to handle network/disk IO unless its a very old instance type, large amounts of AWS own services run on it as well.

The rumor is that Graviton instances are being sold at below cost for Amazon to put negotiating pressure on Intel/AMD. And that M1 only looks as good as it does because of Apple's de facto monopoly on TSMC 5nm. That AMD cores are more than competitive at the same node.

Too soon do people forget that there were budget Zen 2 SiPs whooping the M1's ass back in 2019. It was at the expense of a slightly higher power draw, but that's a price I'm entirely willing to pay for a full-fledged x86 chip. I reckon that I'll accept no substitutes until RISC-V hits the mainstream in a more major way.

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

#297

Post by hinkley »

yyyk wrote: post #283
cletus wrote: post #80

It's amazing how far Intel has fallen. The 10nm debacle exposed how far they've fallen behind on fabs to the point that they're outsourcing to TSMC. Like, how humiliating must that be? Intel completely missed the mobile revolution. They had a stake in that race but sold it (ie XScale). Intel's product segmentation is bewildering. They've also kept features "enterprise" only to prop up high server chip prices to the d…

>The 10nm debacle exposed how far they've fallen behind on fabs to the point that they're outsourcing to TSMC. Like, how humiliating must that be? Every chip Intel buys from TSMC is a chip not made by its competitors. Doing this is extremely useful for Intel to the point I wonder why TSMC agreed in the first place. After all, eventually Intel will improve their fabs, and then it's the non-Intel players that will orde…

Didn't Apple already lock up the 'good stuff' from TSMC?

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

#298

Post by hinkley »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #99
Guthur wrote: post #61

Lol, this stinks of PR BS. It's Intel's vertical integration that has hamstrung its chip design for about half a decade. 10nm transition was an unmitigated disaster and because of it Intel has haemorrhaged technical dominance and has only really maintained market dominance due to entrenched and slow moving decision cycles within the data centre space and to a lesser extend the consumer market. Intel will likely stabl…

Not just technical dominance — we’ve all heard of lead Intel engineers hired away to Apple/Google/Amazon/etc during this period of stagnation. How many senior engineers, staff engineers, and low-level talent in general has Intel bled in the last 5-7 years? How many of them have moved to Qualcomm, TSMC, Apple, Google, etc? At this point, I wonder if Intel is even capable of fixing their technical problems since most o…

Yeah I would assume the cause and effect are reversed. They lost technical dominance but still had a road map that counted on all of those people still being there and on the ball.

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

#299

Post by hinkley »

worrycue wrote: post #219
vanilla_nut wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just technical dominance — we’ve all heard of lead Intel engineers hired away to Apple/Google/Amazon/etc during this period of stagnation. How many senior engineers, staff engineers, and low-level talent in general has Intel bled in the last 5-7 years? How many of them have moved to Qualcomm, TSMC, Apple, Google, etc? At this point, I wonder if Intel is even capable of fixing their technical problems since most o…

Talent comes and goes. If other companies can hire away talent, Intel can hire them back too. If you pay enough, people will come. Intel currently seem quite willing to pay.

It doesn't sound like Intel has been competetive on salaries for quite some time. Last time this came up, it sounded like Intel thought they could get away with Oregon salaries, meanwhile they're now competing with Cupertino salaries, among others. I suspect that they've had a captive audience for so long that they don't have a 'playbook' for a seller's market. All of the people who remember are either fat and happy or long gone.

Love of the work is one thing, but if you can love the same work somewhere else for 40% more you'd better think pretty hard about the wisdom of staying.

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

#300

Post by [deleted] »

elihu wrote: post #289
dimitrios1 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The switch to plastics has saved lots of money and environmental pollution in logistics Ah, but this is debatable! https://www.wri.org/insights/planes-trains-and-big-automobil... "Trains move 32% of goods in the United States, but generate only 6% of freight-related greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile trucks account for 40% of American freight transport and 60% of freight-related emissions." From the beginning of t…

That's an interesting point that without the interstate highway system (which had many benefits) we might be using rail a lot more than we are currently and therefore emitting less CO2. Another way of looking at it is that we could consider the interstate highways only half-complete, and that the important part that was never built was an electrical delivery system for the cars and trucks that use it, so they can rec…

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