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Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

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Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#221

Post by worrycue »

giuliomagnifico wrote: post #21

Intel needs better (especially with less energy consumption) chips not lower price. If Intel will lower the price they will have less cash for R&D and this is the trouble for intel now: not much competitive chips. And where are again at the beginning of the circle. I hope they will make an internal review of their offices/laboratories/whatever, is not a price issue with the chips, is a performance and technical issue…

Quite sure their bean counters have done the math. Intel like any company aims for max profitability given market conditions - i.e. Intel is only drop prices because it maximizes their profit.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#222

Post by worrycue »

st_goliath wrote: post #23
syshum wrote: post #12

In anti-trust terms would this not be "dumping"

Or maybe you could call it "being forced to return to reasonable prices now that their monopoly suddenly has competition again"? Well, at least that's what I remember comments on HN cheerfully proclaiming would happen back when Ryzen & Threadripper were launched.

“Reasonable price” has always been what the market will bare. This is true for all companies.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#223

Post by hajile »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #127
tw04 wrote: post #103

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…

This is very common across many industries. It doesn't cost much more to manufacture a sports car vs a sedan, but the price is very different. No product is based on the price of manufacture, it's based on the price people are willing to pay.

Let’s say it costs 5 billion to design a car (it goes as high as 6 billion) and another 2-3 billion to create all the molds and custom tooling and change over a factory. If you sell 10 million cars, that overhead costs $800 per car. If you sell only 1 million, that’s $8,000 per car. Some sports cars sell even fewer units than that. This is the biggest reason prices are higher.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#224

Post by wmf »

nevi-me wrote: post #52

For the eventual consumers of the servers at the discounted prices: are we going to see the price decrease benefits? If say GCP/AWS/Azure decide to build a DC in a new region, and they go blue primarily because of the discounts, would the pricing end up being slightly smaller than otherwise? I can understand that electricity, cooling and other costs would have an influence; but I'm wondering whether performance & pri…

I noticed that Azure is charging significantly less for Ice Lake even though the MSRP is the same.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#225

Post by munificent »

jvanderbot wrote: post #188
inetknght wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense. Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged. Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.

That's not amoral. It's missing a market opportunity, but conflating that with morality is an interesting way of looking at it. Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something. They will suffer when someone else offers what you want and you leave. That's the point of markets and competition.

> Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something.

This is itself a moral claim. You may choose to base your morals on capitalism, but capitalism itself doesn't force that moral choice.

> That's the point of markets and competition.

And the point of landmines is to blow people's legs off, but the existence of landmines does not morally justify blowing people up. Markets are a technology and our moral framework should determine how we employ technologies and not the other way around.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#227

Post by billsnow »

s1dev wrote: post #161
billsnow wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC support is an actual +10-20% cost in materials for the motherboard and DIMM manufacturers. Also, ECC errors are basically non-existent on desktop/laptop workloads. ECC is worth the extra cost in servers, but for desktops and laptops, the market got it right.

A consumer PC should see a single bit error roughly once a week. That’s hardly non-existent

According to who? I checked the edac module for a year on my work machine, and it never detected a single error. I know I'm just one anecdote, but I doubt I'm that lucky.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#228

Post by kinghajj »

Apes wrote: post #206
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Dumping is selling below the cost of production, with the intent of driving someone else out of a market. This is just normal price competition. It's a good thing.

A monopoly becomes illegal when it negatively impacts consumers. If a company is able to lower costs to better compete with another company taking market share, wouldn't that imply that: 1. They had a defacto monopoly in the sector that allowed them to price above the fair market value. 2. They harmed consumers by pricing above fair market value.

No, it simply means that the market conditions changed. The price could very well have been a fair market value before, and still is a fair market value after; and the delta of these prices reflects the impact of the new conditions.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#229

Post by antonios »

tw04 wrote: post #103

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…

Yes please. ECC support by now should come by default, both in CPU support and in motherboards, RAM chips etc.

At least AMD Ryzen supports it, but the fact that one has to spend a lot of time to research through products, specs, forums and internet chats to figure out a good CPU, m/b & RAM combination that works is cumbersome, to say the least.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#230

Post by adamweld »

jandrese wrote: post #218
deckard1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to note, AMD does every single thing you blame Intel for. AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a…

The worst part is that adding ECC support should only increase the price of RAM by about 13%, which given that the RAM modules are about $50-$100 on most builds works out to $7-$13 to the total cost of the machine. Every machine should come with ECC . It's such cheap insurance. But because the chip manufacturers have to make more money by artificially segmenting the market almost nobody runs ECC on home machines.

13% is huge in a low margin, highly competitive field. the price difference comes down more to economies of scale and less to artificial segmentation.
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