Surprised to see enterprise switching over this quickly from Intel to AMD. How much infrastructure needs to get swapped out when making this switch?
So in cases like this, it’s usually not swapping “good” hw, just ordering replacements from different vendor, when batch of hw reached their planned EOL.
I guess you can get SB/HW from cloud vendors for few reasons:
1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think
2. They are used for workloads that require little of CPU power overall
3. They may have important customers that certified their software for those specific CPU, so they need to keep them in stock
I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating.
Yes but big customers get significantly earlier access than the general public. See how Intel shipped 110k+ units pre-launch: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-sca...
Since we're speculating, let me throw out another possibility: you aren't actually running on hardware that old.
As long as the instruction set is compatible, the hypervisor can freely lie about what CPU you're running on, and GCP obfuscates the CPU model in their instances.