Am I the only one disappointed they didn't settle for 286 cores?
During the 8th gen they made an i7-8086... Hopefully Intel hasn't fired that person.
8086K, actually. I still run one inside one of my PCs!
Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
71–80 of 303 posts
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#72I’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?
"Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications?" They cite a very specific use case in the linked story: Virtualized RAN. This is using COTS hardware and software for the control plane for a 5G+ cell network operation. A large number of fast, low power cores would indeed suit such a application, where large numbers of network nodes are coordinated in near real time. It's entirely possible…
is RAM a concern in these cluster applications, cause if prices stay up, how do you get them off the shelf if you also need TB of memory.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#73These 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 egr…
The main cost with on-prem is not the price of the gear but the price of acquiring talent to manage the gear. Most companies simply don't have the skillset internally to properly manage these servers, or even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process. For those that do, your scaling example works against you. If today you can merge three ser…
As opposed to talent to manage the AWS? Sorry, AWS loses here as well.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm curious, what is the powe draw for such a system? Of course, it heavily depends on the disks, but does it idle under 200W?
I personally feel like I will downscale my homelab hardware to reduce its power draw. My HW is rather old (and leagues below yours), more recent HW tends to be more efficient, but I have no idea how well these high end server boards can lower their idle power consumption?
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#75These 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 egr…
The main cost with on-prem is not the price of the gear but the price of acquiring talent to manage the gear. Most companies simply don't have the skillset internally to properly manage these servers, or even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process. For those that do, your scaling example works against you. If today you can merge three ser…
> even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process.
This is really the core problem. Every time I’ve done the math on a sizable cloud vs on-prem deployment, there is so much money left on the table that the orgs can afford to pay FAANG-level salaries for several good SREs but never have we been able to find people to fill the roles or even know if we had found them.
The numbers are so much worse now with GPUs. The cost of reserved instances (let alone on-demand) for an 8x H100 pod even with NVIDIA Enterprise licenses included leaves tens of thousands per pod for the salary of employees managing it. Assuming one SREs can manage at least four racks the hardware pays for itself, if you can find even a single qualified person.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#76These 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 egr…
Is your calculation also taking cost of energy and personnel that keeps your own infra running?
Is that personnel cost more than running on someone else's infra? Just counting the amount of people a company now need just to maintain their cloud/kubernetes/whatever setup, paired with "devops" meaning all devs now have to spend time on this stuff, I could almost wager we would spend less on personnel if we just chucked a few laptops in a closet and sshed in.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. They can just sell even numbers of vCPUs, and dedicate each hyper-thread pair to the same tenant. That prevents another tenant from creating hyper-threading contention for you.
OP is probably talking about shared vCPUs, not dedicated
For those, wouldn't hyperthreading be a win? Some fraction of the time, you'd get evicted to the hyperthread that shares your L1 cache (and the hypervisor could strongly favor that).
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've heard it claimed that the era of being able to do this (buy slightly old used server hardware cheap on ebay) is coming to an end because, in the quest for ever more efficiency, the latest server hardware is no longer compatible with off-the-shelf power supplies etc. (there was more but that's the part that I remember) and therefore won't have any value on the second hand market.
I hope it was wrong, but it seems at least plausible to me. I'm sure that probably fixes could be made for all these issues, but the reason the current paradigm works is that, other than the motherboard and CPU, everything else you need is standard, consumer grade equipment which is therefore cheap. If you need to start buying custom (new) power supplies etc. to go along, then the price may not make as much sense anymore.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, 100%, but that's why identifying compatible workloads first is key. A lot of orgs skip right to the savings pitch, ignorant of how their applications communicate with one another - and you hit the nail on the head that applications doing even some processing in a cloud provider will murder you on egress fees by trying to hybrid your app across them. Folks wanting one or the other miss savings had by effectively…
Any experience with the mid-to-small cloud providers that provide un-metered network ports and/or free interconnect with partner providers? (For various reasons, I just care about VPS/bare metal, and S3-compatiblity.) I'm looking at those because I'm having difficulty forecasting bandwidth usage, and the pessimistic scenarios seem to have me inside the acceptable use policies of the small providers while still predic…
Vultr and Digital Ocean both offer Direct Connects. I've had good experience with their VPSes.
Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main cost with on-prem is not the price of the gear but the price of acquiring talent to manage the gear. Most companies simply don't have the skillset internally to properly manage these servers, or even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process. For those that do, your scaling example works against you. If today you can merge three ser…
As opposed to talent to manage the AWS? Sorry, AWS loses here as well.
I know of AWS's reputation as a business and what the devs say who work there, so I have no argument against your point, except to say that they do manage to make it work. Somewhere in there must be some unsung heroes keeping the whole thing online.