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

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61–70 of 303 posts

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

#61

Meanwhile, somebody put 8192 arm cores on a chip and ran a risc-v emulator on top of that which emulated a 6502 which then emulated a 288 core xeon and it used 0.01% of the power and outperformed the Intel chip in every other metric 10:1, probably.

You know, a link would be great for this comment.

Too risky.

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

#62

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.

Based on the evidence, not only is infrastructure really hard to set up in the first place, it is incredibly error-prone to adjust to new demand.

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

#63

Meanwhile, somebody put 8192 arm cores on a chip and ran a risc-v emulator on top of that which emulated a 6502 which then emulated a 288 core xeon and it used 0.01% of the power and outperformed the Intel chip in every other metric 10:1, probably.

You know, a link would be great for this comment.

https://theonion.com, probably

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

#64
post #48

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

Do you remember what you dreamed about 7 years ago? An Ampere Altra 80-core-CPU was sold for less than 210€ on eBay in January.

Oh, nice! I always wanted one of those, a many-core build server running ARM would be excellent for Yocto. Anything running in quemu in the rootfs is so slow on x86 and I've seen the rootfs postprocess step take a long time.

Though... these days, getting enough RAM to support builds across 80 cores would be twice the price of the whole rest of the system I'm guessing.

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

#65

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.

You have to pay that infra person and shield them from "infra works, why are we paying so much for IT staff" layoffs. Then you have ongoing maintenance costs like UPS battery replacement and redundant internet connections, on top of the usual hardware attrition.

It's unfortunately not so cut and dry

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E core vs P core is an internal power struggle between two design teams that looks on the surface like ARM’s big.LITTLE approach

E cores ruined P cores by forcing the removal of AVX-512 from consumer P cores Which is why I used AMD in my last desktop computer build

E cores didn't just ruin P cores, it ruined AVX-512 altogether. We were getting so close to near-universal AVX-512 support; enough to bother actually writing AVX-512 versions of things. Then, Intel killed it.

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

#67
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 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…

Maybe no fundamental bottlenecks but it's easy to accidentally write software that doesn't scale as linearly as it should, e.g. if there's suddenly more lock contention than you were expecting, or in a more extreme case if you have something that's O(n^2) in time or space, where n is core count.

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

#69
post #24

So TLDR is it competitive? What are the dimensions and dynamics here vs EPYC?

Not competitive at all. It's easily visible on the laptop lines, where the same GPU manufactured on TSMC has 3 times the power/performance ratio compared to the Intel one. Putting more cores is just another desperate move to play the benchmark. Power is roughly quadratic with frequency, every time you fall behind competition, you can double the number of cores and reduce the frequency by 1.414 to compensate. Repeat a…

??? GPU vs CPU workloads are completely different. Comparing Panther Lake iGPU vs Ryzen iGPU is not going to tell you much about how high density server CPU performance will work out.

The Panther Lake vs Ryzen laptop performance comparisons show that Pather Lake does well, basically trading against top end Ryzen AI laptop chips in both absolute performance, and performance per watt.

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

#70

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…

Do note though that AIUI these are all E-cores, have poor single-threaded performance and won't support things like AVX512. That is going to skew your performance testing a lot. Some workloads will be fine, but for many users that are actually USING the hardware they buy this is likely to be a problem.

If that's you then the GraniteRapids AP platform that launched previously to this can hit similar numbers of threads (256 for the 6980P). There are a couple of caveats to this though - firstly that there are "only" 128 physical cores and if you're using VMs you probably don't want to share a physical core across VMs, secondly that it has a 500W TDP and retails north of $17000, if you can even find one for sale.

Overall once you're really comparing like to like, especially when you start trying to have 100+GbE networking and so on, it gets a lot harder to beat cloud providers - yes they have a nice fat markup but they're also paying a lot less for the hardware than you will be.

Most of the time when I see takes like this it's because the org has all these fast, modern CPUs for applications that get barely any real load, and the machines are mostly sitting idle on networks that can never handle 1/100th of the traffic the machine is capable of delivering. Solving that is largely a non-technical problem not a "cloud is bad" problem.

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