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7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

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Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#111

Post by _0w8t »

piinbinary wrote: post #99

I'm curious why they aren't charging more for it. Wouldn't that be free profit margin? Or perhaps they are trying to hurt Intel by selling it at a price where Intel can't make a profit if they lower their prices to be competitive? Or, maybe it has to do with trying to quickly grab market share. Maybe AWS and other purchases of servers have a somewhat fixed budget, so cheaper chips translates directly to more chips so…

Enterprise and data centers must consider the risk of a supplier not been able to fulfill their contracts. AMD is inherently more risky in the long term than Intel as AMD does not produce chips themselves. So they must offer cheaper products just to account for that. Add extreme inertia in the enterprise sector and one can see why AMD cannot have the same profit margins as Intel.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#112

Post by masklinn »

themgt wrote: post #5

Back in the early 2000s Apple was getting crushed because Moto/IBM's PowerPC couldn't keep up with the 880lb gorilla Intel. Who could have predicted even a few years ago Apple would wind up in a similar situation, yet this time for having bet on Intel? Could the 8 core Mac Pro have been $3650 with a $650 Rome CPU, vs. the reality of $6k with a $3k Xeon?

> Could the 8 core Mac Pro have been $3650 with a $650 Rome CPU, vs. the reality of $6k with a $3k Xeon?

The mac pro uses workstation parts (Xeon W) not workstation parts. It doesn't use a $3k xeon for the base configuration (the 8c16t is a $750 chip) and probably wouldn't use an EPYC either (it'd use Threadripper, which hasn't been announced yet for Zen 2 but the 12c24t Zen+ is $650).

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#113

Post by dethac »

mhh__ wrote: post #68
nickpeterson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that, think of the amount of r&d they pour into arm for mobile. ARM will be their next platform for Macs.

Probably correct but making mobile CPUs is still a level below making the monsters our desktops are blessed with(Think of all the different SIMD etc. extensions the average Intel CPU) has these days

Virtualization support as well.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#114

Post by nolok »

piinbinary wrote: post #99

I'm curious why they aren't charging more for it. Wouldn't that be free profit margin? Or perhaps they are trying to hurt Intel by selling it at a price where Intel can't make a profit if they lower their prices to be competitive? Or, maybe it has to do with trying to quickly grab market share. Maybe AWS and other purchases of servers have a somewhat fixed budget, so cheaper chips translates directly to more chips so…

Customer acquisition. You have a farm of Intel, you know Intel will be back in some years, what will get you to take a risk and bother with having some AMD in there? Less than half the price of the competition.

AMD is not trying to get as much money out of it, they're trying to get market share, in a segment of the market where "single product line all identical all across" is a big thing.

Last time they were on top they didn't, and Opteron failed to take enough market share (a story that is not as well known because the bigger one was the customer chips and Intel abuses with oem). They don't want a repeat.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#115

Post by giobox »

ianai wrote: post #71
leemailll wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on reddit suspect apple’s stance against Nvidia in this driver signing carnage is because they are not happy with Nvidia about cards in MacBook Pro

What did nvidia do?

They screwed over much of the laptop industry in the late 2000s. Google "Nvidia bad bumps fiasco" or "Nvidia bumpgate".

This left the major computer vendors (Dell/HP/Apple etc) with very large bills due to the high failure rate of these Nvidia GPUs in laptops. It was right after this that Apple stopped using Nvidia, I've always assumed bad blood over this was a major factor.

The cost to Nvidia ended up in the hundreds of millions (based on charges one can see in quarterly filings from this time), the total cost of the failures industry wide is pretty hard to establish given laptop manufacturers weren't exactly in a rush to let customers know the extent of the issues...

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#116

Post by opencl »

_0w8t wrote: post #111
piinbinary wrote: post #99

I'm curious why they aren't charging more for it. Wouldn't that be free profit margin? Or perhaps they are trying to hurt Intel by selling it at a price where Intel can't make a profit if they lower their prices to be competitive? Or, maybe it has to do with trying to quickly grab market share. Maybe AWS and other purchases of servers have a somewhat fixed budget, so cheaper chips translates directly to more chips so…

Enterprise and data centers must consider the risk of a supplier not been able to fulfill their contracts. AMD is inherently more risky in the long term than Intel as AMD does not produce chips themselves. So they must offer cheaper products just to account for that. Add extreme inertia in the enterprise sector and one can see why AMD cannot have the same profit margins as Intel.

Both Intel and GF had problems ramping up their new node. Intel has been stuck with chip shortages for the past year and is still on 14nm because of this, AMD was able to (partially) switch to TSMC. I'd say that AMD's ability to pick a vendor and potentially multi-source for fabrication puts them at significantly less risk of supply shortages.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#118

Post by loeg »

nagisa wrote: post #108
piinbinary wrote: post #99

I'm curious why they aren't charging more for it. Wouldn't that be free profit margin? Or perhaps they are trying to hurt Intel by selling it at a price where Intel can't make a profit if they lower their prices to be competitive? Or, maybe it has to do with trying to quickly grab market share. Maybe AWS and other purchases of servers have a somewhat fixed budget, so cheaper chips translates directly to more chips so…

Note, that the list price for Intel Xeons is something that nobody really pays. Behind the closed doors bulk pricing is negotiated and the price-per-chip in practice is only a fraction of the list price.

Enterprise sales: everyone gets 40% off list. Still, 60% is a big multiple of these prices.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#119

Post by rbanffy »

api wrote: post #103
ianai wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, too, they’re likely to get a comparable ARM entrant. The threat of competition puts downward pressure on prices.

I just ninja edited to add that. Hah. Anyway that could happen but keep in mind that a new ISA (for server workloads) is a much harder sell than a new chip brand. An ARM64 would need to be priced much lower (at least in $/perf/watt terms) than this already mega aggressive AMD offering. Personally I think Epyc this cheap really harms ARM's chances in the data center. If Apple goes ARM64 for Mac it could indirectly hel…

> a new ISA (for server workloads) is a much harder sell than a new chip brand

It really depends. As long as performance is there and the apps work as expected, I'll deploy my workloads on whatever runs them for the best cost per transaction. Additionally, we don't have a say on what architecture our hosted services are on - if AWS decides my RDS databases are to move to ARM64, or Google decides my CloudSQL will run on POWER9 - I probably won't notice as long as the performance is right.

In the past I have deployed production Python-based workloads to amd64 and SPARC (I did POWER too, but for fun) without change. I'm most certain I can do the same with ARM64 or RISCV.

Re: 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU with 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

#120

Post by Nexxxeh »

masklinn wrote: post #112
themgt wrote: post #5

Back in the early 2000s Apple was getting crushed because Moto/IBM's PowerPC couldn't keep up with the 880lb gorilla Intel. Who could have predicted even a few years ago Apple would wind up in a similar situation, yet this time for having bet on Intel? Could the 8 core Mac Pro have been $3650 with a $650 Rome CPU, vs. the reality of $6k with a $3k Xeon?

> Could the 8 core Mac Pro have been $3650 with a $650 Rome CPU, vs. the reality of $6k with a $3k Xeon? The mac pro uses workstation parts (Xeon W) not workstation parts. It doesn't use a $3k xeon for the base configuration (the 8c16t is a $750 chip) and probably wouldn't use an EPYC either (it'd use Threadripper, which hasn't been announced yet for Zen 2 but the 12c24t Zen+ is $650).

>The mac pro uses workstation parts (Xeon W) not workstation parts.

I think you mean *server parts

While not addressing your points specifically, which I agree with, and more for anyone else reading as I assume you already are aware...

It is important to remember that the (relatively) high-core-count Zen2 Ryzen chips do differ from Threadripper by more than just core count.

TR has a lot more PCIe lanes and it's quad channel memory (as opposed to Ryzen's dual channel).

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