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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

#91

Post by LunaSea »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #85
carefree-bob wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

This factually did not play out like this in my experience. The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway. And the cost difference was so high that it was possible to hire 5 more people which wasn't needed anyway. Not only the cost but not needing to worry about going over the bandwidth limit and having soo much extra compute power made a very big difference. Imo the cloud stuff is just too full of…

> The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway.

That is incorrect. On AWS you need a couple DevOps that will Tring together the already existing services.

With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#92

Post by bearjaws »

stego-tech wrote: post #8

These 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…

I just don't know if the human capital is there.

At my job we use HyperV, and finding someone who actually knows HyperV is difficult and expensive. Throw in Cisco networking, storage appliances, etc to make it 99.99% uptime...

Also that means you have just one person, you need at least two if you don't want gaps in staffing, more likely three.

Then you still need all the cloud folks to run that.

We have a hybrid setup like this, and you do get a bit of best of both worlds, but ultimately managing onprem or colo infra is a huge pain in the ass. We only do it due to our business environment.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#93

Post by throwaway11456 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #51
bigbuppo wrote: post #47

Meanwhile, somebody put 8192 arm cores on a chip and ran a risc-v emulator on top of that which emulated a 6502 which then emulated a 288 core xeon and it used 0.01% of the power and outperformed the Intel chip in every other metric 10:1, probably.

You know, a link would be great for this comment.

Well Linux was booted on an Intel 4004, emulating a MIPS R3000. Looks like it booted in 4.76 days. I don't believe this article was AI fabricated.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-o...

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#94

Post by [deleted] »

throwup238 wrote: post #75
carefree-bob wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

> 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 kno…

[deleted]

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#95

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #20
stego-tech wrote: post #8

These 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…

> 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. I agree, but . For one, it's not just the machines themselves. You also need to bu…

> Then, you need a second site, no matter what. At least for backups, ideally as a full failover. Either your second site is some sort of cloud, which can be a PITA to set up without introducing security risks, or a second physical site, which means double the expenses.

You can technically have backblaze's unlimited backup option which costs around 7$ for a given machine although its more intended for windows, there have been people who make it work and Daily backups and it should work with gdpr (https://www.backblaze.com/company/policy/gdpr) with something like hetzner perhaps if you are worried about gdpr too much and OVH storage boxes (36 TB iirc for ~55$ is a good backup box) and you should try to follow 3-2-1 strategy.

> Then, all of that needs to be maintained, which means additional staff on payroll, if you own the stuff outright your finance team will whine about depreciation and capex, and you need to have vendors on support contracts just to get firmware updates and timely exchanges for hardware under warranty.

I can't speak for certain but its absolutely possible to have something but iirc for companies like dell, its possible to have products be available on a monthly basis available too and you can simply colocate into a decent datacenter. Plus points in that now you can get 10-50 GB ports as well if you are too bandwidth hungry and are available for a lot lot more customizable and the hardware is already pretty nice as GP observed. (Yes Ram prices are high, lets hope that is temporary as GP noted too)

I can't speak about firmware updates or timely exchanges for hardware under security.

That being said, I am not saying this is for everyone as well. It does essentially boils down to if they have expertise in this field/can get expertise in this field or not for cheaper than their aws bills or not. With many large AWS bills being in 10's of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think that far more companies might be better off with the above strategy than AWS actually.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#96

Post by Agingcoder »

50lo wrote: post #27

With packages like this (lots of cores, multi-chip packaging, lots of memory channels), the architecture is increasingly a small cluster on a package rather than a monolithic CPU. I wonder whether the next bottleneck becomes software scheduling rather than silicon - OS/runtimes weren’t really designed with hundreds of cores and complex interconnect topologies in mind.

Yes there are scheduling issues, Numa problems , etc caused by the cluster in a box form factor.

We had a massive performance issue a few years ago that we fixed by mapping our processes to the numa zones topology . The default design of our software would otherwise effectively route all memory accesses to the same numa zone and performance went down the drain.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#97

Post by DetroitThrow »

throwaway11456 wrote: post #93
jvanderbot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, a link would be great for this comment.

Well Linux was booted on an Intel 4004, emulating a MIPS R3000. Looks like it booted in 4.76 days. I don't believe this article was AI fabricated. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-o...

Somehow, that still doesn't sound real, but it looks like it is. Wow. Though that one was written by their recently fired hallucination writer.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#98

Post by toast0 »

iberator wrote: post #29

Why do you needs so many cores for? Apache threads? Any old school wizard here?

I used to run many hosts with 28 cores per host. If performance scales, it's nicer to have a few 288 core hosts rather than a few hundred 28 core hosts.

Getting the performance to scale can be hard, of course. The less inter-core communication the better. Things that tend to work well are either stuff where a bunch of data comes in and a single thread works on it for a significant amount of time then ships the result or things where you can rely on the NIC(s) to split traffic and you can process the network queue for a connecrion on the same core that handles the userspace stuff (see Receive Side Scaling), but you need a fancy NIC to have 288 network queues.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#99

Post by bigbuppo »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #63
jvanderbot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, a link would be great for this comment.

https://theonion.com , probably

Ah, nice to see a fellow lover of the finest news publication on the planet.

Re: Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

#100

Post by mgaunard »

LunaSea wrote: post #91
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This factually did not play out like this in my experience. The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway. And the cost difference was so high that it was possible to hire 5 more people which wasn't needed anyway. Not only the cost but not needing to worry about going over the bandwidth limit and having soo much extra compute power made a very big difference. Imo the cloud stuff is just too full of…

> The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway. That is incorrect. On AWS you need a couple DevOps that will Tring together the already existing services. With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

Ops people are typically more useful given you probably already have devs.
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