Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
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Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#2One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#3One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
> with proportional RAM and storage
Let's not get carried away here
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#4One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
Some of the AMD offerings like this on Ebay are pretty close to affordable! It's the RAM that's killer these days...
I still regret not buying 1TB of RAM back in ~October...
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#5One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
Some of the AMD offerings like this on Ebay are pretty close to affordable! It's the RAM that's killer these days... I still regret not buying 1TB of RAM back in ~October...
I bought a bundle with 512GB of RAM and an older 24-core EPYC (7F72) + supermicro motherboard on ebay a bit over a year ago, it was really an amazing deal and has made for a truly nice NAS. If you're okay with stuff that's old enough that you can buy decommissioned server stuff, you can get really high-quality gear at surprisingly low prices.
Companies decommission hardware on a schedule after all, not when it stops working.
EDIT: Though looking for similar deals now, I can only find ones up to 128GB RAM and they're near twice the price I paid. I got 7F72 + motherboard + 512GB DDR4 for $1488 (uh, I swear that's what I paid, $1488.03. Didn't notice the 1488 before.) The closest I can find now is 7F72 + motherboard + 128GB DDR4 for over $2500. That's awful
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#6I’ve not kept up with Intel in a while, but one thing that stood out to me is these are all E cores— meaning no hyperthreading. Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications? Also does anyone know if there have been any benchmarks against AMDs 192 core Epyc CPU?
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#7[deleted]
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#8These sorts of core-density increases are how I win cloud debates in an org.
* Identify the workloads that haven't scaled in a year. Your ERPs, your HRIS, your dev/stage/test environments, DBs, Microsoft estate, core infrastructure, etc. (EDIT, from zbentley: also identify any cross-system processing where data will transfer from the cloud back to your private estate to be excluded, so you don't get murdered with egress charges)
* Run the cost analysis of reserved instances in AWS/Azure/GCP for those workloads over three years
* Do the same for one of these high-core "pizza boxes", but amortized over seven years
* Realize the savings to be had moving "fixed infra" back on-premises or into a colo versus sticking with a public cloud provider
Seriously, what took a full rack or two of 2U dual-socket servers just a decade ago can be replaced with three 2U boxes with full HA/clustering. It's insane.
Back in the late '10s, I made a case to my org at the time that a global hypervisor hardware refresh and accompanying VMware licenses would have an ROI of 2.5yrs versus comparable AWS infrastructure, even assuming a 50% YoY rate of license inflation (this was pre-Broadcom; nowadays, I'd be eyeballing Nutanix, Virtuozzo, Apache Cloudstack, or yes, even Proxmox, assuming we weren't already a Microsoft shop w/ Hyper-V) - and give us an additional 20% headroom to boot. The only thing giving me pause on that argument today is the current RAM/NAND shortage, but even that's (hopefully) temporary - and doesn't hurt the orgs who built around a longer timeline with the option for an additional support runway (like the three-year extended support contracts available through VARs).
If we can't bill a customer for it, and it's not scaling regularly, then it shouldn't be in the public cloud. That's my take, anyway. It sucks the wind from the sails of folks gung-ho on the "fringe benefits" of public cloud spend (box seats, junkets, conference tickets, etc...), but the finance teams tend to love such clear numbers.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#9I’ve not kept up with Intel in a while, but one thing that stood out to me is these are all E cores— meaning no hyperthreading. Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications? Also does anyone know if there have been any benchmarks against AMDs 192 core Epyc CPU?
It's a trade off. Hyperthreading takes up space on the die and the power budget.
As to E core itself - it's ARM's playbook.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#10I’ve not kept up with Intel in a while, but one thing that stood out to me is these are all E cores— meaning no hyperthreading. Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications? Also does anyone know if there have been any benchmarks against AMDs 192 core Epyc CPU?
It all depends on your exact workload, and I’ll wait to see benchmarks before making any confident claims, but in general if you have two threads of execution which are fine on an E-core, it’s better to actually put them on two E-cores than one hyperthreaded P-core.