The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons
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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 manufactures. Instead, marketing, market segmentation and customer value are the cost determining factors.
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.
Personally I don't really buy it completely either, but quipping "because the market!" as an answer is missing the point. The article is about what that market desire means for future revenue.
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.)
Needless to say, I didn't even bother to set these up lest build a rack for them (my normal rack is both full and too short). If packaging weren't so annoying with computer servers I would've sold them long ago.
[1] The good stuff. High static pressure, high flow fans from Delta with ball-bearings, and of course only speed monitoring, no regulation. These Sun servers make for excellent magnet boards for holding papers just without using any magnets.
[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.
Still can’t. The new bottom end model (iSeries) is cheaper (sub 10k) and will last for another 10 years until a new one is needed. The place I work is buying a new one because it is hitting the end of support (damn thing was bought before 2008). No problems that lasted more than a couple of hours in all that time.
If you don't mind my asking, what tasks do your folks have the AS/400 doing nowadays?
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.
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 after the iPhone first appeared, and with no touch features to speak of or anything close to an iPhone experience.
The inertia of success definitely plays a role. For instance, BlackBerry was logically concluding that they "must be doing something right" a few years after the iPhone came out because their financials still looked pretty great, due mainly to the global expansion (the iPhone wasn't in that many countries at first, and Android still had single digit market share). So that's how they rationalized keeping their high non-competitive prices.
I assume something similar is going on at Intel. They continue seeing a large influx of server buyers even with AMD's EPYC being out because of inertia - customers already deciding to buy Xeons in 2017 a few years ago - like say Google which bragged so much about being the first to get a Xeon Skylake. So Intel rationalizes this as "having no reason to reduce its prices, and in fact it could even increase them since it sees so much demand!"
But that logic is going to hurt them a few years from now, when AMD or perhaps some ARM competitors like Qualcomm start becoming more established in the market and they've had a few years of "people hearing good things about their products." Right now the new AMD and ARM chips are untested and the majority of companies like to play it safe.
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.
Of course so does a $5 raspberry pi.
Thanks nonetheless to both you.
People who have only been buying Intel CPU in the last decade won't jump ship immediately. Nobody gets fired for buying Intel CPUs, at least until very recently. You know you won't have compatibility issues etc...
Of course within the next few years Intel will have to react somehow, either by outperforming AMD significantly to justify the premium or by slashing prices.
Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.
The choice to avoid risk is easy.
This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered.
If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.
I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...
The AS/400 (IBM i) and ClearPath are my favourites.
One with its TIMI architecture and kernel level JIT, the other with an history going back to the 60's using an almost memory safe systems programming language, while people are still debating how to replace C.
Just curious, do they still support the Windows/Symbian style of dynamic libraries, with import libraries?
(The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)
Absolutely.
Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc;
The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run:
A) Windows
B) Full Disk Encryption
TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.
It is officially supported on TR and Epyc, as well as Pentiums, i3s, and Xeons (entry-level Xeons are nowhere near as expensive as people think they are).
If you think you need ECC my advice is to build out around a platform where you won't be the first person to try something and run into the bugs. There is not a large community of ECC-users on Ryzen.
But if your production environment goes tits-up then your savings go out the window and a whole lot more besides. And that's what you're risking by running a hardware configuration that is non-validated/unsupported.
People constantly make the mistake of assuming that businesses need to pinch pennies on their money-generating assets, just like they do on the rigs they use for entertainment at home. In the business world, reliability and official support trump an extra $1k in your pocket every time.
Forget Xeons entirely: there are still a lot of customers who buy Sun/Oracle/IBM hardware even though it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. $1k does not even register for a lot of businesses.
(ECC is validated on Epyc, of course - but the prices are a lot closer to Xeons there, it's no longer a slam-dunk. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis to determine which is actually a better deal for your workload. And frankly AMD has been doing an undue amount of massaging on their benchmarks here, like in their launch data where they just straight-up removed 43% from all the Intel benchmarks. )
http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus...
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? I'd rather just buy a $300 processor that checks all the feature boxes instead of all but one.
http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_e3_1245_...
I believe this is called agglomeration[0][1], and may have parallels beyond physical, competing stores, into realms like similar, but differently named CPU's.
[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098017694131 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
edit: rplst8 mentions binning, and that seems like another likely factor as well.
Mobile chips are very small, under powered, and under clocked. They get fabbed first.
Then your core i3/i5/i7/E3's are all fabbed. As the process matures and can be expected to regularly handle 4GHz.
Next your E5/E7's get ran, normally in a few waves. Your _enthusiast_/workstation cores are generally fabbed with E5/E7 engineer samples which get sent out for testing. These have [1] 20+ cores so you need to know your process is stable so you don't have to sell >50% of them as 8-16core Xeons.
---
But yeah the product segmentation is mostly to gate access. Only Xeons offer ECC [1].
And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
Ultimately this started to be a organization issue. Consumer sales (i3/i5/i7) doesn't even talk to enterprise sales (E5/E7). Consumer support can't answer questions about enterprise chips.
My personal opinion is the only reason Intel is still in business is they have a monopoly. Their anti-consumer practices are down right twisted.
[1] can/only are strong words there are a lot of exceptions/gotchas in Intel's product lines. Celerons/Pentiums sometimes have ECC, i3's and Pentiums have had unlocked Multiplers. There is a line of Xeons with unlocked multiplers. IDK
> And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
These statements are false, which you yourself acknowledge later in your post. You don't get credit for noting a caveat when the caveat is that your point is entirely false, at least in my book.
Intel no longer manufactures 2-core Xeons so Pentiums and i3s support ECC nowadays. This isn't uncommon, this has been the norm literally since they stopped making 2C Xeons (Haswell?).
And there are currently unlocked i3s in the lineup, just like there have been unlocked Pentiums in the past. It's the norm that Intel offers a barnburner overclockable SKU somewhere in the low end. They don't always, but they do it probably every other generation.
What's up with the i3-6320 supporting ECC but the i3-7320 no longer supporting it? Intel is at the least, very inconsistent with ECC on the consumer side.
Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?
Note that the ECC on the processor's internal data buses and caches is completely independent of whatever ECC the memory controller may or may not use.
Bingo.
Today, AMD's Eypc CPUs are a much closer match to their Xeon competitors than Opteron was. So if history is anything to go by, Intel has little to fear from AMD's latest efforts.
Given they've been slapped down for this, I wonder if they'll try it again. If they don't, AMD could have an easier go this time round.
They couldn't sell enough because someone was paying their customers not to buy their (superior) product.
1. Opteron in the early 2003 to 2004 did have a good run. It forced Intel to lower prices as well as using dirty tactics to compete. Let's not forget Opteron was AMD first entry into Server market. AMD then failed to execute after that.
2. Software compatibility was a thing, and may still be a thing judging by the comments here. But remember Datacentre is now largely dominated by Cloud and Web Host Providers, and most of them depends on Open Sources Software. All of a sudden, Google Amazon and Microsoft have incentives to improve software compatibility, if there is such problem exist.
3. IO compatibility / performance used be a problem for AMD. I am surprised it is not mentioned anywhere. Intel has the best IO ever with their Chipset. From PCI-E, SATA, AGP etc. But now none of these IO implementation are secrets anymore. Thanks to the SoC IP industry you can get the best and leverage the battle tested IP from other vendors. And not to mention the really only IO left is PCI-E. Which is very well defined.
I expect there will be lots of interest to test out EPYC, but the real volume will be Zen 2, when the industry has settled on EPYC being good enough. And I cant wait to see how Intel would react, after all if you look at their recent management teams changes it seems they dont have a clue what they are doing.
AMD will have to go through the tough adoption curve of early adopters to mature markets and while this happens Intel has relatively free reign with their pricing and value.
Markets with long established leaders have the additional burden of too many vested interests, misinformation and dirty tricks. However if AMD continues to deliver the naysayers will eventually lose credibility.
Stuff like that makes me unwilling to go with AMD when I have a choice. I view them as offering competitive performance on paper but completely falling short when it comes to reliability.
Stuff like Intel unable to perform below 80 degrees on 4 cores, makes people switch with ease.
I think Intel's value based on performance isn't good compared to Ryzen, but the product isn't inherently flawed, and that combined with AMD's shaky history is enough to keep myself, and lots of people I know from switching. (Right now stories of RMAs for the Risen GCC crash bug taking ages are popping up)
Higher base clock on the 7700k, biggest reason for entertainment alongside:
Higher OC potential (back in the 4790k days 5Ghz on air was something else, for the 7700k not getting 5Ghz is considered "losing the silicon lottery")
Cheapest 7800X motherboard is 100$ more than cheapest 7700k motherboards (which are still quite good) because X299 is a HEDT platform
Most entertainment machines won't benefit from quad channel over dual channel in a meaningful way.
The 7700k is generally regarded as the fastest gaming CPU available, that's why so many benchmarks use it. I'm pretty sure AMD used it to showcase Vega because even if it becomes a bottleneck, no other CPU on the market can be "less of a bottneck"
And I'll add, this is all with my entertainment/gaming hat on.
For a dev machine where I'd expect to work with compiled languages or compiling OSes I'd definitely go with more cores.
Frankly I've never heard of a 6950X overheating and throttling, the lid is soldered on those processors. Sounds like a personal problem.
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 that the 8C Ryzens are cheaper than the 8C and 10C Intel SKUs (the 6C have been competitive for a long time), and the tradeoff is you are moving to a much more immature platform.
Claims like "oh my Ryzen was so much cooler than my 6950X" set off my bullshit detector real hard because that's not what the people who are actually measuring things are saying. They usually end up being made on the basis of the TDP figures, which AMD's marketing department has massaged significantly downwards from their actual measurements.
Ryzen is basically on par with Haswell, it's not the second coming of Jesus unless you've been in a coma since Bulldozer was released.
Later iterations of Ryzen are undoubtedly going to fix some of the teething issues (segfaults, memory clocks, etc), and probably get the clocks up too. But they will also be going up against Coffee Lake and others - Intel can iterate on their products too.
Consumer Ryzen is basically just Haswell with an AMD sticker on it, and it's just so transparently fake to see all the fanboys cooing over a product they wouldn't even give the time of day to when it was released under an Intel badge. It's an incremental improvement on pricing, but not really that drastic except in a few special cases (the 8C and 10C Intel processors had very steep pricing).
As it's on a newer stepping with a better platform and fully-validated ECC support, Epyc is much more interesting product to me. But it's also a market that doesn't care about throwing money at the problem if that's what it takes to get performance/stability - there are plenty of companies who are not even using COTS hardware let alone off-brand.
Also, bear in mind that "nm" measurements are pure marketing. It's now the spacing between features that determines total density, not feature size. Intel is at least a full node ahead of everyone else in density, even if others claim to have "14nm" nodes.
Or so this guy claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AavuWT17X48. Seems to be borne out by reviewers' general impressions though.
But Vega 64 is overvolted severely to get to the 1080's level of performance so it runs hot and loud. Some people have been able to undervolt their cards until they reached reasonable power draw for the performance level, but AMD wouldn't set a high voltage for no reason, implying they did it to improve what percentage of their yield could be shipped as Vega 64
my r9 270 started doing that and died completely (as in, stopped POSTing) a couple weeks later. i'd try to RMA.
The crashes seem to be manifesting the heat issues it has. Even at stock voltage and power it hits 80 degrees and starts running into stability/throttling issues
Heck, Intel might even not really have the production volume on all SKUs to sell to non-hyperscale! And if that's true, then why would they do anything other than milk the few customers it deigns to sell to?
Home users don't have liquid nitrogen piped into their homes or even really the expertise for hot vs. code aisles, but AWS is building their own datacenters, at which point they could pipe liquid nitrogen in if they chose to. At the scale and concentration to AWS is building at, I certainly hope it leads to faster computers, if not bigger AWS bills.
The way I recall, AWS had to be embarrassed into offering GPU instances rather than taking the lead in, so maybe there's a competitor out there building for speed.
The huge cloud vendors should be buying and deploying AMD systems right now to ensure that never happens; it doesn't matter if there are some kinks to iron out. As an insurance policy it is very cheap.
There are enterprise people that will adopt AMD for the shear $/compute value, but until you can find rackable Dell SKUs and Supermicro server motherboards with AMD sockets and the whole 'enterprise' software stack is fully ironed out Intel can and will command a premium. It will happen, eventually (assuming AMD continues to compete,) but it's not here yet.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6que0q/esxi_65_now_wor... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryzen...
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryze...
> AMD has not provided an official public explanation of the fundamental problem, but from those in our forums and elsewhere, it appears to affect Ryzen CPUs manufactured prior to week 25.
This problem only affects a minority of chips in the first place (likely a litho flaw in the cache section), it's probable that Larabel's second CPU just didn't happen to be one of the ones with problems. And Week 25 ends June 25, i.e. stock for these date ranges has hardly even made it through packaging/distribution to end users let alone been extensively tested yet.
Larabel is jumping the gun on insufficient evidence and people are racing to make the claim that AMD has fixed this, when that's far from the case. AMD certainly hasn't made any statements to this effect.
AMD is RMA'ing afflicted units, which is really all that can be done until they get a new stepping out. But I've seen no evidence that this is actually fixed.
What are you basing this on? I've seen no good reporting on this* but the AMD Community segfault thread (https://community.amd.com/message/2796982) seems to suggest that almost all Ryzen CPUs manufactured before the end of June (which I assume is most of the current stock) are affected. Very few people load their Ryzens sufficiently to hit this bug, but a large number of those who attempt it seem to get the segfault.
* I would like to know the percentage of processors with the bug, percentage of review units with the bug (I would be very interested in this), and maybe some long-term testing of "bug free" processors etc.
I'm not spending hundreds of euro on a processor without knowing something more concrete about this issue. If you budget is really ~million dollars, do you have additional information about this that you can share?
Additionally, if you rely on Intel's compiler to get more performance out of your chips, well, switching to AMD doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
AMD needs to be back in the server space for a while before they'll be trusted again.
That being said, I still agree AMD still needs to prove their new platform in the server space.
Remember that Intel's embarrassing FDIV bug was spotted in Excel...
Its "kernel", btw.
This is also the way it started with x86 and other second-sourceable processors. An Intel 8086 and an AMD 8086 are drop-in compatible. This is not the case with modern processors, they don't even fit the same sockets.