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Comment by dunpeal | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how this "incumbency advantage" would help Intel, exactly. The server market is highly competitive. If AMD puts out superior product at an attractive price, nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".

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Thats exactly what they would say. Reliability track record, existing software/project restraints and enterprise relationships matter more than the price tag. That's why Intel can still charge rediculous amounts for enterprise chips for some time.

I remember a time when Opteron had a very large part of the server market. It's about lack of competition, not about how businesses love Intel charging a fortune for their product.

Who's making chips to compete with Intel? AMD, IBM, and nobody else (ARM isn't high-performance yet). IBM's lock-in with POWER is scary to businesses. AMD wasn't competitive for most server needs. That left Intel to charge whatever they wanted (and they did).

With EPYC, there was finally a competitive offering at a great price (not to mention a better track record with meltdown and the constant stream of spectre variants). All the same software runs on the AMD chips too.

>nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".

Maybe not those exact words, but people will say "We are adding a server to our VMWare ESXi cluster, so if want it to be compatible with our existing hardware we better stick with Intel."

VMWare's high availability feature (a highly desired feature for any data center) won't work across different CPU architectures, so unless you are replacing your entire stack and not just adding server(s) then you have to stick with the architecture you already have in place.

These aren't "different CPU architectures". They would all be x86-64 so unless VMware uses some specific Intel feature it shouldn't be a problem.

I have been a Sys Admin for 7 years. It is a problem, vmotion won't work going from AMD to Intel or vice versa (at least not in any official way). In fact it is highly suggested when building ESXi stacks that you get the exact same model CPU for each server.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/305792 https://www.v-front.de/2013/04/how-to-vmotion-from-intel-to-...

No, Intel FlexMigration and AMD-V Extended Migration architectures are different, and vMotion isn't supported across them.

EVC does not allow for migration with vMotion between Intel and AMD processors.[1]

This isn't really that surprising. x86-64 is standard, but extensions aren't. Eg, here's some of the new extrnsion in Zen vs Steamroller: Compared to the AMD Opteron™ "Steamroller" EVC mode, this EVC mode exposes additional CPU features including RDRAND, SMEP, AVX2, BMI2, MOVBE, ADX, RDSEED, SMAP, CLFLUSHOPT, XSAVES, XSAVEC, SHA, and CLZERO [1]

[1] https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003212

Indeed, AMD's best in would be at the larger scale end, where someone might add whole sites at a time and choose AMD for a new datacenter, since inter-site live vMotion is pretty unusual.

A project that I currently work on procured new hardware and one of the constraints for the selection was that pretty much exactly the same hardware must be available in three years. So this one will be buying intel for the foreseeable future.

I don’t consider that an unusual constraint.

> nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".

Actually, that is the case, it will take about 1-2 hardware generations of customers _asking_ for AMD before it's featured prominently by any vendor (except the extreme ones like SuperMicro)

If nobody is actually calling their HP/Dell reps asking for it then it will never happen.

Fortunately that already happened; HPE and Dell have Epyc servers that are comparable quality to their Xeon servers.

Market perception matters though, and I know many people -- IT admins included -- who think that Intel is just higher quality. Those people will be hard to capture quickly, and AMD will need to hold a lead for a while to change that perception

It doesn't help that Ryzen had few relatively high-profile issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924192 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Se... https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/RyzenMachineL...

Not implying that Intel chips are flawless (still bitter about Haswell TSM), but as you said, market perception matters.

Things aren't always that simple. For example AMD may be cheaper per core, but if you're running AVX heavy code then intel has a throughput advantage. At least it did with Zen, Zen2 has some improvements in that area, so we'll have to measure again.

Moving to the next intel generation is usually simple, incremental change. Moving between vendors means a lot of re-evaluating if you're crunching numbers.

If your workload needs a lot of PCIe lanes for IO or you need cheap systems with ECC ram then the story changes quite a bit.

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