Intel Refreshes 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable, Slashes Prices

Public cloud is a giant scam to make sure 80% of VC money trickles back up to the big three. Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a single threaded C++ server. But that's not cool and trendy. You're supposed to pretend that you could suddenly become Google overnight, so you need The Cloud(TM), microservices, and all kinds of redundant garbage.

Using the current AMD inflated price, you could get an Intel Gold 5218R 20 for $1273. Even with the official pricing of 7302 closer to $900, you are paying only ~$370 for Intel's 4 More Cores and higher Turbos. Not to mention you still get overall higher IPC on Intel's part.

And once you factor in the price of the whole system with ECC RAM, SSD, Network Adaptor etc ( Which you get discount from Intel's part ). The whole package cost isn't so much in flavour of AMD.

So I dont see what is the real killer here. Intel ( And arguably AMD ) are still selling as many as they could make. The EPYC 2 was announced Mid 2019, and it has been 6+ months since it was launched, and yet Intel is still making record Datacenter revenue. With EPYC making minimal gains on a already dismally small base number. I.e Even If they had 100% increase in shipment from a Base Market Share of 1%, it would still only represent 2% of the market.

With the launch of a competitive Notebook APU, where Notebook represent 70% of today's PC market shipment, the assumption of more EPYC Orders with four HyperScaler, launch of two new console, Ray Tracing GPU, new GPGPU, AMD is forecasting 30% YoY revenue growth. Different people may have different perspective on this number. But I really dont see any "Real Killer" here.

And that is speaking as someone who really wants to see AMD to grow a lot more, but the Data suggest otherwise.

> It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days

By “the cloud” I’m assuming you mean aws/gcp/azure, and comparing them simply with on-prem is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other cloud and bare metal hosting providers who actually pass on the savings as hardware value improves.

They could benefit if they looked at infrastructure as a profit center instead of a cost center, and paid/outfitted their IT staff appropriately. But most won't, and AWS/Azure/Gcloud/etc is a way of offshoaring infrastructure to those that do view it as a profit center. In some ways it's positive, as non-technical leadership is coming around to the fact that they don't do technology that well, and can still look modern/ahead of the curve at conferences by using "the cloud".

>have already had an epyc shit taken on them

I hope to be able to come up with amazing wordplay like this one day.

$1,000 in CPU is nothing when in one server you are spending $32,000 on RAM and even more on disks.

Plus, if I have 16 more cores I'm just going to buy even more of the two, sometimes I can't fit any more in the server so I can't increase my density if I wanted to.

Isn’t the intel 6208U a strong competitor to the AMD 7302? At the same price and TDP it has higher clock speeds and a unified memory domain, compared to the AMD 4-way NUMA architecture. It seems like you can make a case for either, depending on your workload.

AMD doesn't support 4 way, nor do they support (well) ECC. Intel still has a huge advantage for serious/critical use cases.

I whole-heartedly welcome AMD's new offerings and have completely switched to buying servers with AMD CPUs, but I have to disagree with the characterization of "ruthless milking" by intel. There was no instituted monopoly here. Others were free to compete, but they failed. Intel's high prices motivated AMD to create something better and now they have. If anything, the high pricing was a screwup on intel's part and good for the consumer. Intel could have better protected their lead by charging less (but not as less as now) to discourage competition. I'm glad they didn't, even though it cost me for the last few years. Now that there is a valid competitor again, maybe we will see better conformance to Moore's Law.

Edit: To clarify, I will not argue that intel has a clean record of competitiveness. My point is that they didn't "ruthlessly milk" the consumer with high prices. Instead, they stuck a knife in their own back by charging excessively high prices without sufficiently innovating. This created an opportunity for AMD and motivated them to create something better.

Oh this is a tried-and-true strategy that both nVidia and Intel follow again and again. And it works like a charm.

Think of market share as a fragile glass or ceramic cup sitting right at the edge of the table. You're usually oblivious cz it hasn't fallen (or you're busy with other stuff). Then you notice it has tipped over and is now in free fall. If you have very good reflexes, as a big market share company, you catch it mid-air (you lower the prices to the point where it prevents the drop from breaking anything). If you succeed, now you have the cup in your hand; it didn't hit the floor, and it didn't shatter. Great. Now you slowly raise that cup back to the tabletop level (you raise the prices back to the same level in a few years) and place it at the table. Done.

- AMD revenue is between $5-10b,

- nVidia, between $10-20b

- Intel, over $50b.

Intel and nVidia can eat AMD alive anytime they want. Invidually or together. Once, or many times.

It's fabulous! I have a customers with slow/large databases, and now I can tell them that there is an incredibly cost-efficient hardware solution available. Sure, clever indexing schemes are often the best, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be able to throw 128 cores at a problem without having to check the organisation's credit rating. Even a single-socket AMD server with the cheaper 48-core CPU simply demolishes workloads that used to cause an eye-watering amount of money to handle.

You certainly can’t tell by the amount of people getting hyper sensitive in this thread.

Those are very different situations. Intel has held a technological advantage and, up until recently, no one could compete with them so they could command their price. With ISPs there is a huge capital investment cost, and with EVs there are supply chain issues limiting capacity and commanding higher costs.

With last-mile internet, the incumbents have made significant capital investments and competitors have so far been unwilling to engage in the sort of long term slow return investment necessary to build out infrastructure. Google Fiber has tried all means to lower the cost of entry and has thus far failed to deliver significant gains and they're unwilling to make the huge capital investments necessary to truly compete because ensuing price wars would make realizing a return near impossible.

With BEVs the problem is manufacturing cost, primarily the cost of batteries needs to drop but the demand for EVs has not warranted dramatic ramp ups in battery manufacturing necessary for that to occur. The supply of suitable batteries is so limited that Jaguar and others have actually had to stop production.

Honest question: do you think Teslas are, on the whole, overpriced? I am neither an owner nor an expert in electric cars, but I have been routinely impressed with the rate at which the price has come down. I don’t doubt that the $35k Model 3 configuration is probably non-sensical (at $35k minimum spec seems silly) but also it seems pretty competitive for an electric car that can replace a gas car. My personal hunch has always been that the price for relatively cheap Tesla configurations that make sense probably are limited by volume and initial cost of R&D and scaling up manufacturing. (Of course almost any company does some market segmentation for better or worse, so I’m sure the prices of options are non-sense.)

Not to say the prices won’t go down. But I actually didn’t think the reason they were high was due to mature, moated companies. My personal belief is that Tesla would be foolish to rest on their success in such a way when other companies with a lot more resources are surely going to be competing more competently soon.

If this is really your impression of the industry, you must be really young. It’s not “long-moated”. Intel was in a similar situation when the Opteron was current, and before they had to go head-to-head with Sun and IBM and before that nobody would even think of putting intel in a server at all. The period during which Intel’s products were the obviously superior choice lasted maybe 5-8 years at most. And it wasn’t some nefarious plot, either. Just good product.

Residential Power, Solar will hit a tipping point soon for home installs. And I'd expect the proliferation of microgrids around renewable sources mixed in with batteries.