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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

#301

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…

Having no margin of error on these SKU's would be terminally dumb, but having tight error bars isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Being able to sell bad batches of product takes some of the sting out of failure, and past a certain point you're just enabling people to cut corners or ignore fixable problems. Having a tolerance of 1 bad core means if I think I have a process improvement that will reduce double faults but costs money to research and develop, aren't I more likely to get that funding?

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

#302
post #289

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…

> electrical delivery system for the cars and trucks that use it, so they can recharge their batteries without even stopping.

> and we can pair the electrified road sections with cheap solar power

I don't know. More cars on the road in general is just a bad idea IMO. Traffic, noise, accidents, parking lots, Fast and the Furious movies...

Alternatively we can use a system of transport that can carry a whole neighbourhood in one go, is electrified and can be built underground like a billionaire suggested we do for cars. It can be automated and sorta self driving too, can hit 180km/h without too much of a fuss. And we've been building them for almost 200 years.

Wouldn't that make more sense?

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back it seems so barbaric. I remember how they briefly tried those black foam sticker pads in the corners of the substrate before acquiescing and using the IHS. At some point they realized they could do better than a heatsink mounting system that involved trying to balance a heavy metal object on a small pedestal while trying to hook a tensioned spring to a clip you couldn't see by exerting tremendous downwar…

Only as barbaric as the ~50dB, 4krpm tiny fans on enthusiast coolers in those days.

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

#304
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

It was reported Apple bought most of the immediate TSMC next-gen node production. This does indirectly helps Intel, since Apple is not a direct competitor. However, even TSMC current-node is very competitive, and the core logic still holds:

Any fab time Intel buys is a chip AMD can't make. Since Intel is so much larger, they can significantly hurt AMD merely by outbidding them, and eventually still make profit. This is so effective I'm not sure this should have been allowed...

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

#305
post #44
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.

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.

M1 is the only arm part with memory ordering like x86. This allows them to hit x86 into Arm but not worry about the change in visibility to main memory by different threads.

None of the server parts have that. But by the time you do run your code on an Arm server, most of the bugs will be worked out.

The M1 is special.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before M1 my only exposure to ARM has been low-power SBCs and Android devices, and the experience was mediocre in the “just works” department. Poor hardware support, and a lack of proprietary software support. Performance was also lacking. Apple’s tight integration and high-end CPUs have resulted in a vastly better experience, but I want to have more options than just macOS and MacBooks. I think we’re trending in the…

I have tried buying microsoft arm computers since the last two gens now both the surface prox x with qualcomm sq1 and sq2 as well as another yoga book 5g. Windows performance on these platforms is so trash, you feel like going back ten years on ultrabooks. Even their own apps are not optimized or some like visual studio didnt even run. Compare that to x86 builtin emulation on apple m1, it performs so close to native…

I vaguely remember seeing a video demonstrating a an M1 device virtualizing Windows ARM faster than it ran on Surface ARM hardware. Kind of reminds me of how an Amiga of the era could be set up to virtualize(?) Mac OS faster than contemporary hardware Mac could.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before M1 my only exposure to ARM has been low-power SBCs and Android devices, and the experience was mediocre in the “just works” department. Poor hardware support, and a lack of proprietary software support. Performance was also lacking. Apple’s tight integration and high-end CPUs have resulted in a vastly better experience, but I want to have more options than just macOS and MacBooks. I think we’re trending in the…

I have tried buying microsoft arm computers since the last two gens now both the surface prox x with qualcomm sq1 and sq2 as well as another yoga book 5g. Windows performance on these platforms is so trash, you feel like going back ten years on ultrabooks. Even their own apps are not optimized or some like visual studio didnt even run. Compare that to x86 builtin emulation on apple m1, it performs so close to native…

It's tempting to blame the user hostility on corporate shortsightedness or disfunction, but I wonder if MS has a long-term plan here?

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

#308

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…

> toothpaste tubes used to be metal in the 60s and you were supposed to punch a hole on the front of it with the back of the cover cap I'm definitely too young to remember anything from the 1960s, but you can still buy tomato paste in tubes like that. Neat.

Anchovy paste too.

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

#309

> 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.

German retail distributor https://www.techspot.com/news/90718-amd-smashing-intel-retai...

" full 85 percent of processors sold by Mindfactory in May 2021 were from AMD, leaving just 15 percent of the pie for Intel."

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

#310
post #245

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…

They took right to choose for myself from me for my own good! Like Abortion, Apple genius telling me I should buy new device because replacing battery will cost the same, or Tesla charging $15K for broken battery cooling pipe, is that what you are saying?

>VRM configuration

New CPUs have same TDP.

>memory trace topology

worked fine with previous CPUs at speed X

>and PCB layers

see above

>> The average AMD 400 Series motherboard has key technical advantages over the average AMD 300 Series motherboard

funny you say that, AMD didnt think so before the backlash https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/amd-zen-3-processors-w...

AMD Zen CPUs are full S0Cs nowadays. What they call "chipset" is just a PCIE connected Northbridge. Everything important is integrated inside CPU. pcie, ram, usb 3.0, sata, HD Audio, even RTC/SPI/I2C/SMBus and LPC are on die. You can make perfectly functional system with just an AMD CPU alone.

How about AMD Smart Access Memory totally requiring 500-series chipset despite being just a fancy marketing name for standard PCI Express Resizable BAR support? Already shipping disabled for 2 prior generations before being announced as 5000 exclusive. Oh, enough uproar and even that crumbles a little bit https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320548-amd-will-suppor... but still linked to "chipsed" while implemented entirely inside CPU.

Or that time x470 was going to support PCIE 4, but then it was made x570 exclusive. Despite the fact "chipset" doesnt even touch the lines between CPU and slots.

oh, but but the bios size limit, we cant support all the CPUs on same motherboard (like they did in Socket A days) ... in a 16MB bios chip? please.

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