Chips with problematic cores are sold as lower end chips. For the same production cost, you are getting less revenue - failure rate plays a big role in profit margins.
Vs throwing the whole die away because you don't sell enough systems that small? Its hard to tell, but intel still has a strong markup on 24 core parts being sold from 28 core dies. Intel has often be "caught" down selling parts to protect their higher margin parts. (AKA they are selling parts with things disabled that work)
they weren't "Caught" - binning is a common practice in the cpu industrty. this isn't a problem
Whatever happened with the Qualcomm Centriq ARM based server CPU? It never became available at any reasonable price in small quantities for software development/test/prototyping as something you could actually buy an ATX motherboard + CPU together and install (redhat, centos, debian, freebsd, whatever) on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-... h…
Qualcomm abandoned it when they became a target of an LBO.
It made sense for them to reuse their design expertise and hedge into other markets so that they didn't get stuck exclusively with trends in mobile devices. AAPL told their suppliers to withhold royalties, hurting revenue. And once AVGO took aim, they needed better focus. Centriq was a long term bet that could've worked out (cloudflare had a positive review) but it just wasn't in the cards.
Vs throwing the whole die away because you don't sell enough systems that small? Its hard to tell, but intel still has a strong markup on 24 core parts being sold from 28 core dies. Intel has often be "caught" down selling parts to protect their higher margin parts. (AKA they are selling parts with things disabled that work)
they weren't "Caught" - binning is a common practice in the cpu industrty. this isn't a problem
I wasn't talking about binning, I was talking about when you have binned at a certain level, but the product is sold under its capability because you want to maintain the illusion of scarcity of the better parts.
AKA its a perfect part, but its being sold with a couple cores disabled or at a frequency below whats its capable of.
Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience
I assume there is a pretty big lag between AMD CPUs being much better and prebuilts including them and businesses noticing they are better.
> and most software on Linux is distributed as source Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.
Yeah exactly, you're not going to skimp on the CPU by choosing ARM to save $500 a year when you have software that costs you thousands every single year. You're going to stick with x86_64 instead of the crappy budget option that doesn't even run your software.
Not every corporation has proprietary x86 binaries they need to run on a server. Every company I have worked at has had entirely open source server software and a few proprietary javascript libraries.
This comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to pr…
Uhh source on AVX512 not downclocking on modern CPUs? We benchmarked ML workloads on the newest chips the cloud had to offer and the slowdown was a significant problem because, as the parent comment said, it is very hard to reason about whether the benefits of vectorized ops will outweigh the the reduced clock speed. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not - which is a major problem when you have to specify instr…
FPGAs are in a tough place. Like OP said, most people writing RTL make asics, or at least an asic that's programmable. The FPGA target market is getting slimmer, since we have programmable Asics, like GPUs and tpus, that are as performant with easier programming. They will still serve a niche market, but the "write c++ and run on an fpga" will likely never take off.
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason a…
Also, Intel is bizarrely behind on PCIe. Historically, a data center machine with big expensive GPUs or other accelerators also had a couple of expensive Xeons in it. Right now, AMD has a much better offering even ignoring cost. I’m sure someone outside x86 (Amazon? ARM itself? POWER?) will jump in, too.
POWER has had PCIe gen4 for a couple years now too.
Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz. I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.
> when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Early on, books sales was Amazon's core business.
> With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads Oddly, Intel ought to have an edge here, because they have been selling chips with embedded 100 Gbps Ethernet controllers on-die. However, I've never seen such a beast in data centre, I suspect they've "reserved" this feature for HPC workloads only.
That was 100G Omni-Path (not Ethernet compatible) which has been subsequently canceled, I guess due to lack of demand. Intel's 100G Ethernet NICs were years behind other vendors due to the 10 nm fiasco.
Intel had always said they were behind because they wanted to be. In other words, they didn't think 100G was on the rise. I tend to believe them since nic asics are much easier to make than an x86 processor.
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason a…
Also, Intel is bizarrely behind on PCIe. Historically, a data center machine with big expensive GPUs or other accelerators also had a couple of expensive Xeons in it. Right now, AMD has a much better offering even ignoring cost. I’m sure someone outside x86 (Amazon? ARM itself? POWER?) will jump in, too.
I think they were intentionally behind. None of their products used/supported pcie4, so it was to their advantage to limit their competitors.