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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Disagree that Intel is a dead man walking. If they see a serious threat in the number of 1U size ARM servers actually going into production at scale, which is not happening yet, they have the ability to make 50% price cuts on 16/24/32-core xeons to make them competitive again. With no new r&d money.

You cannot yet buy small to medium sized quantities of ARM motherboard from any of the top ten taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. Intel and AMD have advantages of massive economy of scale.

If you look at the global server market for individual bare metal hypervisor platforms priced from $900 to $11000 each, x86-64 is literally like 99% of motherboards shipped. The other 1% is probably spread between arm, power and other even more esoteric platforms.

I would dearly like to be proven wrong. If anyone is aware of a $400 arm board I can buy right now from MSI, asus, gigabyte, supermicro, tyan, quanta, or others please post a link here.

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I'd guess that Intel is "coasting" on purpose to maintain their ability to consistently deliver improvements. The company doesn't benefit from deploying their best tech as fast as possible if there is nothing to compete with it. When there is competition, it is easy for them to move forward.

I would like it if there were ARM servers in the marketplace too, but as yet it doesn't seem they are a real threat. "dead man walking" is a bit premature when the competition barely exists.

yeah, I mean to make an analogy, it's like declaring Toyota a "dead man walking" because Tesla has awesome tech. Before researching the number of new-build cars/trucks/vans shipped and delivered to customers each year...

Toyota, cars, 9.1m

Tesla, all of 2017: Something like 101,000

It’s also like looking at the iPhone in 2007 and saying Nokia can do x/y/z to keep the upstart out.

Fact is, mis-placed corporate focus and the sense of superiority kicks these companies off top spot.

Intel, as it stands this minute IS next.

They can’t price like ARM, they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have - those two things are what Intel usually relies on itself to dominate competitors (eg like AMD).

Add to this that Intel really is focussed on growing its business outside of chips and continually dropping the ball on the chip side (how late is CoffeeLake? Can anyone understand their marketing kefudgery with the generational mixture of chips?) and it’s an absolute recipe for corporate implosion.

>they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have

It is the other way around when you are talking about Server market. The Scale of ARM devices in IoT or even Samrtphone has near zero advantage on Server. ( The instruction set, x86-64 / ARMv8 matters very little )

There is a solid ecosystem for building arm instruction set mobile phones to run Android.

There are lots of little tiny IoT type things that run the arm instruction set and do it really well, but they are not in the same class as serious server motherboards.

ARM is just now barely scratching the surface of the number of pci-express 3.0 "lanes" you can get with one EPYC or threadripper socket.

There is nearly zero current ecosystem of serious server motherboards to run Linux either bare metal or with the kvm or xen hypervisors. Things with a lot of ddr4 ram, m.2 nvme SSD PCI Express slots, pci-express 3.0 x16 slots, 10 and 100 Gbps NICs (SFP+ and qsfp28 form factor).

Every arm server board I have ever seen to date is a special one off low quantity thing produced for a special purpose.

As it stands right now a manufacturer like supermicro can fit four single socket motherboards in a 2RU chassis, and populate them with something like the $750 EPYC 16-core which will run circles around anything arm based. Or a cloud scale operator can put a whole shitload of 1U size individual chassis into use with standard atx size motherboards and populate them with $275 each, ryzen 7 2700 CPUs.

> which will run circles around anything arm based.

Do you have a single number to back that up?

I'm not sure how you can believe that. Right now the biggest problem is total lack of availability of ARM servers. Perhaps Qualcomm's Amberwing is competitive but the only source of information about it is from Cloudflare in SIMD workloads. Infrastructure like networking is an obvious target for ARM servers because it can be accellerated via SIMD but is the performenace good enough for regular application development like webapps or databases? We don't know and they won't tell us. The only reason to believe or hope that they are superior is because you have a grudge against the established players.

I don't even claim that ARM is better than Intel on SIMD workloads. Quite the opposite. Intel has AVX2 and AVX512 that rip ARM apart on most highly parallel workloads. This very specific snippet benefits a bit more from ARM SIMD due to the presence of specific instructions lacking in SSE. But AVX512 has so much more instructions, with a much wider application.

That is assuming they will do price cut.

I think Intel is in some trouble when, Cloudflare decide to and finish improving all the Open Source library used by majority of Internet companies with NEON optimized version, and Qualcomm ship its 2nd generation of Centriq which promised improvement in IPC, I think we are looking at 2020.

But Intel already has a New uArch they are working on specifically for Server, along with 7nm which is roughly TSMC / Samsung's 5nm. i.e Intel will still be at least 1 year ahead in leading edge node on Server.

And Let's not forget Intel's FPGA, if they can some how making it to work seamlessly in Servers.

by 2020 AMD will be shipping its third generation of EPYC...

> I would dearly like to be proven wrong. If anyone is aware of a $400 arm board I can buy right now

Not from the manufacturers you mentioned, but it is possible to buy an ARM board in a standard form factor that can be used in high performance applications. [1]

[1] http://macchiatobin.net/

Wow, 269USD is pretty good. 10GigE ports and upto 16G memory... tempting!

Looks pretty nice for Linux based network device development, but I'm going to bet the CPU performance is in a tier well below a Coffee Lake Core i3 8100. Not really in the same category as single socket, narrow (two systems in 17.5" 1U chassis width), 8, 16, 24 or 32-core Xeon or EPYC.

Good luck getting a standard Linux kernel to run on those Armadas though.

I looked briefly and found no mention of being able to run a Debian or centos derived distribution on them. Chicken or egg problem.

I wonder if they fixed the issue present on the (very similar) Espressobin board where using a PCIe card will crash the system.

Marvell are an awful awful company to do anything with if you have any expectation of driver source, kernel upstreaming or them even reading your emails unless your company has an n-million contract with them.

It seems like they have a few firewalls to burn through before a dramatic xeon price cut. They could just start churning out xeon-d parts that are already fairly affordable and designed to basically compete with most of these server arm parts.

It's hard to overstate how good Intel is at what they do. It sucks that they haven't been radically increasing performance like they used to, but they had been doing it for 40 years. It also sucks that they do seem to slow play things a little and enjoy the margins. Do they still own an ARM license? Could they make their own ARM parts again if they wanted?

I don't think Intel is going to die anytime soon, but I do hope for a stronger competition between ARM based server, Intel and AMD.

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