Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by kaliszad » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

everforward wrote: post #156

throwup238 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work in SRE and the way you describe it would give me pause. The first is that SRE team size primarily scales with the number of applications and level of support. It does scale with hardware but sublinearly, where number of applications usually scales super linearly. It takes a ton less effort to manage 100 instances of a single app than 1 instance of 100 separate apps (presuming SRE has any support responsibiliti…

Many people assume that companies need or want global enterprise level of management of infrastructure or 24/7 support. That's simply not the case. Many small and mid-sized companies just need their applications to run. There is no CTO on the board and nobody else really cares where the stuff runs if it fits a certain budget, is available enough to not cause major disruptions and is responsive enough to not cause complaints. Some companies may care about a certain level of compliance/ security and whether their admins/ DevOps people seem to be in agony most of the time but of those there aren't many. That's also a reason why the EU introduced directives such as NIS2, DORA, CRA, CER, even the now 10 year old GDPR and more.

Most companies I have seen have never updated the BIOS of their servers, nor the firmware on their switches. Some of those have production applications on Windows XP or older and you can see VMware ESXi Any sufficiently old company will accrete systems and approaches of various vintages over time only very slowly ripping out some of those systems. Usually what happens is that parts of old systems or old workarounds will live on for decades after they have been supposedly decommissioned. I had a colleague who was using CRT monitors in 2020 with computers of similar vintage, probably with Pentium III or early Pentium IV, because he had everything set up there and it just worked for what he was doing. I don't admire it, yet that stuff works and I do respect that people don't want to replace expensive systems just because they are out of support, when they do actually work and they have people taking care of them.

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

#272

Post by Agingcoder » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

consp wrote: post #244

fc417fc802 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong level of abstraction. NUMA is an additional layer. If the program (script, whatever) was written with a monolithic CPU in mind then the big picture logic won't account for the new details. The kernel can't magically add information it doesn't have (although it does try its best). Given current trends I think we're eventually going to be forced to adopt new programming paradigms. At some point it will probably m…

Isn't high grade SSD storage pretty much a memory layer as well these days as the difference is no longer several orders of magnitude in access time and thoughput but only one or two (compared to tha last layer of memory)?

Optane was supposed to fill the gap but Intel never found a market for this.

Flash is still extremely slow compared to ram, including modern flash, especially in a world where ram is already very slow and your cpu already keeps waiting for it.

That being said, you should consider ram/flash/spinning to be all part of a storage hierarchy with different constants and tradeoffs ( volatile or not, big or small , fast or slow etc ), and knowing these tradeoffs will help you design simpler and better systems.

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

#273

Post by nixon_why69 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

stinkbeetle wrote: post #256

nixon_why69 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the heck does the OS see it as a single system, is there some pcie or rdma black magic that allows the kernel to just address memory in a different chassis? Maybe CXL?

No it's actual hardware coherent memory across the system. At a high level it is the same way two cores/caches are connected within one chip, or the same way two sockets are connected on the same board. Just using cables instead of wires in the chip or on a board. This system has SMP ASICs on the motherboards that talk to a couple of Intel processor sockets using their coherency protocol over QPI and they basically p…

Thanks for answering.

So it's not CXL, instead it's proprietary ASICs masquerading as NUMA nodes but actually forwarding to their counterparts in the other chassis? Are they proprietary to HP or is this some new standard?

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

#274

Post by fennecfoxy » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

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…

>Realize the savings to be had moving "fixed infra" back on-premises or into a colo versus sticking with a public cloud provider

As other people have pointed out: what happens when the PSU or mobo shits itself, what happens when the new version of vmware or docker (or whatever) shits itself, etc

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

#275

Post by saati » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #229

zadikian wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, does a single CPU chip have numa within it now, or are you only talking about multi-socket machines?

Modern AMD processors are basically a bunch of smaller processors (chiplets) glued together with an interconnect. So yes single chip nodes can have many numa zones.

That was Zen 1, the later ones don't have per chiplet memory controllers, it's all on the single IO die, and they are not NUMA for a single socket.

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

#276

Post by lich_king » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #203

lich_king wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are any fundamental bottlenecks here. There's more scheduling overhead when you have a hundred processes on a single core than if you have a hundred processes on one hundred cores. The bottlenecks are pretty much hardware-related - thermal, power, memory and other I/O. Because of this, you presumably never get true "288 core" performance out of this - as in, it's not going to mine Bitcoin 288 as f…

> I don't think there are any fundamental bottlenecks here. You memory only has so much bandwidth, but now it's shared by even more cores.

You're responding out of context. The parent was asking if there are bottlenecks specifically related to scheduling. I explicitly made the point that if there are bottlenecks, they're more likely related to memory.

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

#277

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

roryirvine wrote: post #254

Figs wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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. Very much depends on what you're doing, of course, but "you just stop and wait" for sickness/vacation sometimes is actually good enough uptime…

So the entire business was happy to go offline for 2/3 weeks whenever their infra person fancied going off on their summer holiday? By doing this, you're guaranteeing a bus factor of below 1. I can't think of any business that wouldn't see that as being a completely unacceptable risk.

I agree.

I never understand the drive to stay away from cloud services for small scale operations. It’s not your money that’s being spent on the cloud, but it is your free time being asked to be on call when you encourage your company to self-host!

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

#278

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

jononor wrote: post #265

roryirvine wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the entire business was happy to go offline for 2/3 weeks whenever their infra person fancied going off on their summer holiday? By doing this, you're guaranteeing a bus factor of below 1. I can't think of any business that wouldn't see that as being a completely unacceptable risk.

Bus factor 1 is rarely enough for "entire business". But if the GPUs are for training models, and their users are the data scientists that are also on holiday around the same times - that might indeed be good enough policy.

> and their users are the data scientists that are also on holiday around the same times

I’ve seen this before. It turns into restrictions on when you can schedule vacation times.

Not fun when your family wants to go on a trip but you can’t get the time off because it’s not one of the allowed vacation times.

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

#279

Post by ragall » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #263

throwup238 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of all the comments on numbers, SREs, and scaling, you get the response for meeting numbers with numbers! >> $120K isn't going to cover the fully loaded costs of an SRE who can set up and run that. > Literally this. I can do SRE on-prem and cloud, and my 50/30/20 budget break-even point (as in, needs and savings but no wants - so 70%) is $170k before taxes. Rent is astonishingly high right now, and the sort of…

> What universe are we living in that a single SRE can't manage even a single rack for less than half a million in total comp? The kind where TC isn’t measured by pod managed, but by person hired. Also the world where median rent in major metros is $3500 a month. If you think $120k is rich, you’re either operating in the boonies, outside the USA/Canada, or incredibly out of touch with the cost of living today and nee…

> outside the USA/Canada

Indeed, there's no reason for a company to host this kind of batch compute in North America. You can get very good people in Eastern Europe at 1/3 the cost.

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

#280

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

justsomehnguy wrote: post #148

Aurornis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

If a business which require at least a quarter million bucks worth of hardware for the basic operation yet it can't pay the market rate for someonr who would operate it - maybe the basics of that business is not okay?

I’m not disagreeing. I’m explaining to the commenter above that $120K isn’t going to cover the costs of a full-time SRE who will be on call 24/7

If a business can’t afford a properly staffed crew with enough allowance to cover a rotation of on call duties and allow for vacations, they should prefer the managed cloud services.

You’re paying more but you’re buying freedom and flexibility.