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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

#121

Post by formerly_proven »

Aurornis wrote: post #114
tgrowazay wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted 8xH100 is ~$250k, depreciated across three years => $80k/year, with power and cooling => $90k/year (~$10/hour total). AWS charges $55/hour for EC2 p5.48xlarge instance, which goes down with 1 or 3 year commitments. With 1 year commitment, it costs ~$30/hour => $262k per year. 3-year commitment brings price down to $24/hour => $210k per year. This price does NOT include egress, and other fees. So, yeah, th…

$120K isn't going to cover the fully loaded costs of an SRE who can set up and run that. Hiring 1 person to run the infrastructure means that 1 person is on-call 24/7 forever. If there's an issue with the server while they're sick or on vacation, you just stop and wait. If they take a new job, you need to find someone to take over or very quickly hire a replacement. There's a second bus factor: What happens when that…

> There's a second bus factor: What happens when that 8xH100 starts to get flakey?

These come in a non-flakey variant?

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

#122

Post by bgnn »

MengerSponge wrote: post #11
rubyn00bie wrote: post #6

I’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?

I don't know the nitty-gritty of why, but some compute intensive tasks don't benefit from hyperthreading. If the processor is destined for those tasks, you may as well use that silicon for something actually useful. https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1096

Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth.

Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best

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

#123

Post by barrkel »

carefree-bob wrote: post #58
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…

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…

What about the cost of k8s and AWS experts etc.?

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

#124

Post by Dylan16807 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #111
LunaSea wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To be clear, I'm not writing about on-premise. I mean difference between managed cloud and renting dedicated servers

Even if you do include physical server setup and maintenance, one or two days per month is probably enough enough for a couple hundred rack units.

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #114
tgrowazay wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted 8xH100 is ~$250k, depreciated across three years => $80k/year, with power and cooling => $90k/year (~$10/hour total). AWS charges $55/hour for EC2 p5.48xlarge instance, which goes down with 1 or 3 year commitments. With 1 year commitment, it costs ~$30/hour => $262k per year. 3-year commitment brings price down to $24/hour => $210k per year. This price does NOT include egress, and other fees. So, yeah, th…

$120K isn't going to cover the fully loaded costs of an SRE who can set up and run that. Hiring 1 person to run the infrastructure means that 1 person is on-call 24/7 forever. If there's an issue with the server while they're sick or on vacation, you just stop and wait. If they take a new job, you need to find someone to take over or very quickly hire a replacement. There's a second bus factor: What happens when that…

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by UltraSane »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #46
jmward01 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud = the right choice when just starting. It isn't about infra cost, it is about mental cost. Setting up infra is just another thing that hurts velocity. By the time you are serving a real load for the first time though you need to have the discussion about a longer term strategy and these points are valid as part of that discussion.

Is infra really that hard to set up? It seems like infra is something a infra expert could establish to get the infra going and then your infra would be set up and you would always have infra.

Secure and reliable infrastructure is hard to set and keep secure and reliable over time.

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

#127

Post by hagbard_c »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #2

One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.

Just give it a few years and you'll be able to buy the thing for a fraction of the 'current' price. By that time it will be considered to be 'slow' and 'power-hungry' and people will wonder why you're intent on running older hardware but it'll still work just fine. The DL380 G7 under the stairs here also used to cost an arm and a leg while I got it for some finger nail clippings.

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

#128

Post by citrin_ru »

carefree-bob wrote: post #58
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…

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…

> price of acquiring talent to manage the gear

Is it still a problem in 2026 when unemployment in IT is rising? Reasons can be argued (the end of ZIRP or AI) but hiring should be easier than it was at any time during the last 10 years.

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

#130

Post by moffkalast »

whateverboat wrote: post #34
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.

I think linux can handle upto 1024 cores just fine.

https://xkcd.com/619/
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