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The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

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Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#81

Post by rplst8 »

rocqua wrote: post #38
wlesieutre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but with a $300 budget on Intel you're choosing between an i7-7700K or a Xeon E3-1245v6, which are all but identical . The Xeon has a slightly higher base clock, slightly lower turbo (all clocks are changed by 0.1 GHz), ECC, and a locked clock multiplier. It appears to benchmark consistently a couple of percent below the i7. What's even the point of that product segmentation existing? To annoy their customers?…

Best I can come up with is binning. Maybe some CPU's fail on the ECC front, so they sell those as 7700 and up the factory boost clock to compensate and 'market to consumers'. Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?

> Best I can come up with is binning

Bingo.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#82

Post by calimac »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #8

With the concentration of server buying by AWS I am surprised Intel believes it can get away with this. AWS has the expertise and the incentive to push for supporting a competitor that offers a superior value.

And that if case and point of the problem we face with the sheer size of AWS.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#83

Post by bsder »

ajross wrote: post #41
std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Q: Why is Intel charging so much? A: Because enough people pay. Q: Why do people pay so much? Why do they pay a high premium for top performance? A: Because, considering all factors, it's worth that much for them. For many it's too much but for many others it's ok. Q: But it's the same silicon! A: Manufacturing cost plays little role when the price is not dictated by a race to the bottom between different manufacture…

That's really not what the article is about at all. It's talking about the history of the tech industry and associating this kind of price motion with "peak" revenue for given hardware products. Your same answer would apply to IBM's mainframes in 1990 and Sun's servers in 2001 too, and the point of the article is to associate Intel's current position with those products, which clearly reached peaks at those moments.…

One thing missing from the comparison to IBM and Sun is that precisely because those companies made things so expensive people started looking for alternatives.

The ES/9000's were really good machines for the time. Had IBM not raped people on those, companies might have stuck with them for a little longer. The AS/400 was priced more reasonably and people loved those. You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to a Unix workstation if you used a nuclear bomb.

As for Sun in 2001, the problem was that they were so absurdly overpriced and underpowered that commodity x86 simply blew it away. If I didn't have direct knowledge of the dysfunction that was Sun at the time, you would have thought they were taking kickbacks from Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. to limit performance. (Explanation: Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. all had very expensive software packages that were licensed per processor core per year and effectively only ran on Sparc. So, the lower the performance of the processor, the more cores you needed and the more expensive your license to Oracle, et al.)

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#84

Post by quickben »

paulmd wrote: post #80
quickben wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't taking about the lid. The raw thermal output is different under a full non-transient load. Why the cynism?

Real-world power consumption between the 6950X and the 1800X aren't supposed to be terribly different either. What did you measure before and after? https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/amd-ryzen-1800x-and-am... https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R... > Why the cynism? Because in performance and efficiency Ryzen is basically equivalent with Haswell-E/Broadwell-E. The sole advantage it has is…

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9959/samsung-announces-14lpp-m...

https://semiaccurate.com/2016/09/01/intel-finally-narrows-14...

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#85

Post by concede_pluto »

dis-sys wrote: post #31
imtringued wrote: post #5

Server CPUs are way too cheap compared to the remaining parts of the server. Paying 10% more in exchange for software compatibility is a steal.

Intel agreed to license the x86 to AMD decades ago, it is the precondition to allow Intel to avoid being sued to bankruptcy for monopoly. For current software, the current arch is called AMD64 for a reason - the mentioned compatibility is built entirely on AMD inventions.

Not only to avoid enforcement, but also because some customers will only select products where a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source is also selling them.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#86

Post by yllaucaj »

agumonkey wrote: post #78
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price theory. Microeconomics… which is largely how a single actor makes a decision, whether to buy something or where to set a price, and how that leads to market equilibria when many people do that in some utility-maximizing manner.

Also, does this include the psychological effect of price ? selling at 0$ doesn't mean people will grab it, they might assume it's crap. Thanks nonetheless to both you.

I think a question like that would fall under the umbrella of "consumer behavior".

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#88

Post by ajross »

bsder wrote: post #83
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not what the article is about at all. It's talking about the history of the tech industry and associating this kind of price motion with "peak" revenue for given hardware products. Your same answer would apply to IBM's mainframes in 1990 and Sun's servers in 2001 too, and the point of the article is to associate Intel's current position with those products, which clearly reached peaks at those moments.…

One thing missing from the comparison to IBM and Sun is that precisely because those companies made things so expensive people started looking for alternatives. The ES/9000's were really good machines for the time. Had IBM not raped people on those, companies might have stuck with them for a little longer. The AS/400 was priced more reasonably and people loved those. You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to…

Even the IBM machines were flagging in performance in 1990. That was the beginning of the RISC revolution, and all the benchmark records were being taken by MIPS (and later Alpha) boxes. It was a slower process than the Intel takeover[1] only because ECL logic was still available to expensive machines, allowing clock rates in the mainframe world to stay higher than CMOS chips even as their architectures got eclipsed.

[1] Ironically on the back of a "CISC" architecture. What happened there was that CMOS density had gotten so high that the relative advantage of a RISC ISA (not architecture: every thing form the P6 onward looks like a pipelined RISC box on the inside) was just a pipeline stage or two and a 1% hit in the transistor budget for decode.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#89

Post by Paianni »

mtgx wrote: post #64
std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Q: Why is Intel charging so much? A: Because enough people pay. Q: Why do people pay so much? Why do they pay a high premium for top performance? A: Because, considering all factors, it's worth that much for them. For many it's too much but for many others it's ok. Q: But it's the same silicon! A: Manufacturing cost plays little role when the price is not dictated by a race to the bottom between different manufacture…

That's not always the case. Sometimes monopolies are born and the companies charge more money out of arrogance that there isn't anyone out there that can "truly" compete with them. But that same arrogance is often what ends up bringing them down. See Nokia and BlackBerry's arrogance in relation to the rise of the iPhone. They were still charging similar or higher prices than the iPhone for their flagships a few years…

You're not really being fair on Nokia or BB; Nokia had an iPhone competitor when they added phone functionality to their Maemo 'Internet Tablet' OS in 2009, creating the N900. Sadly it had to compete with another in-house project to add multi-touch and HW acceleration to Symbian. After Nokia announced the merger of Maemo with MeeGo, they were unable to forge a clear way forward for their smartphones ever again.

Blackberry took far too long to make touch devices their numero uno, from the Storm in 2008 to the Z10 in 2013. In the meantime they had to cope with a lacklustre platform, as just about everyone did until Android came around. They should also have cross-platformed BBM far, far earlier than they did.

Re: The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons

#90

Post by nwatson »

pjmlp wrote: post #60
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not what the article is about at all. It's talking about the history of the tech industry and associating this kind of price motion with "peak" revenue for given hardware products. Your same answer would apply to IBM's mainframes in 1990 and Sun's servers in 2001 too, and the point of the article is to associate Intel's current position with those products, which clearly reached peaks at those moments.…

Another example missing in the article was the graphics workstations with SGI.

I remember considering spending lots of student-budget money in 1993 for an SGI Indy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy), a low-end graphics workstation from SGI. I think this was shortly before peak-SGI.

I'm glad I didn't, because (a) PCs started to see impressive graphics performance improvements not so longer after; (b) I went to industry and ended up working in enterprise software instead.

SGI market cap peaked in 1995, here's a HN discussion of a 1997 article of SGI's "Sad Saga": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8462841 . They shifted focus to scientific/enterprise compute and storage after and dwindled away.

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