Intel Xeon E5 v3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
Add in the small volume cost of having to sell this thing into the server market, the price point they're putting their 'reticle buster' at is astounding. They must have really tuned their 22nm process as it's matured... the rest of the industry would kill for that kind of process :-)
If you have been wondering why laptops have gotten such terrible displays (or other components) for so long, this is the reason. OEMs have no room for anything else when the processor is 40 percent of their cost.
The more expensive the processor is, the less (proportional to the total cost) impact a more expensive non-processor part has on the final cost, so I don't think that's the explanation.
i5 + 8 GB + SSD for $x. If it isn't on the list of things people look for then manufactures try to save money on it.
So, if I accept that, then the reason laptops have what was upthread called "such terrible displays" isn't that Intel processors are too expensive, its that better displays aren't on the list of things that (manufacturers think) most of the market is looking for.
Also the rest of the industry is moving to 20nm this fall. In fact, Apple's new A8 is likely built on 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC.
Ad absurdum, say only 1% the 18 core dies have no defects and can be sold as such. In a vacuum, the chip would have be priced very high to cover the costs of low yields.
But since they can sell the defects at 8 cores for $1000 and 12 cores for $2000, they can be profitable on the reject chips alone. The 18 cores that work are a bonus.
They're no doubt priced at what Intel thinks the market will bare, meaning that either the process is great (so they're priced low to sell a ton), or that there's just not that much demand for the most high end product. Or some combination of the two.
22nm has been out for several years now. Intel can get good economies of scale by using their big 450mm wafers (other fabs use 300mm)
The transistor count IS very high, but there are others in the server space (eg. latest Oracle Sparc) that are even higher.
http://blog.timesunion.com/business/intel-says-450mm-will-de...
Microsoft licenses by core as well
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-move-li...
Core licensing is purely a price differentiator to get as much money as possible. The idea is that those willing to shell out money for 64 cores for their servers will be willing to shell out 20x or similar than those with 2 cores.
That's the key. Complaints about core-based licensing aren't really about core-based licensing but about the very concept of value-based licensing (aka extract as much revenue as possible).
The Oracle list price would be north of a couple of million dollars if I was buying "options" like partitioning.
The software and hardware prices are totally out of whack. Especially considering the R&D that has to back up processors.
(Eg the Power S824 cint/fp rate results at http://spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2014q3/)
Just wondering if you have more benchmarks than what looks like Spec benchmarks? I'm definitely interested if another manufacturer can beat Intel at single-threaded performance.
I'd wait until the Haswell-EX or Broadwell-E/EP chips.
(socket contention because of cache-to-cache traffic going through QPI)
presentation on the problem http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...
Those Who Are About To Die ... err ... write kernel scheduler We Salute You
clojure, golang and before all that erlang as well (and myriads of libraries e.g. cilk etc). dearth of parallel languages have never really been the issue, imho.
<the 'opine' part>
it's how to move existing applications to new h/w, with the caveat that doing a flat out re-write is almost out of question. hoping that there will eventually be compiler that can just parallelize your application code, is just a pipe dream, imho.
If your problem is "I have a lot of requests from a web server that are quickly dispatched", then parallel programming doesn't get you anything.
The problems where number of cores matter are already looking at parallel programming solutions because they're running the problems on multiple machines, right?
NOW, for a new desktop application that would benefit from parallel programming, it becomes interesting. Perhaps the startup time of the JVM doesn't even matter anymore. :)
why not? If a page render has 10 independent processes that must be completed before data can be returned to client, doesn't the pmap function give an approx 10X speed-up? Or are you talking in the aggregate where each request is being handle in its own thread, and then the page render speed is really just I/O bound. But even in that case if the web server is doing some heavy computation (wolfram alpha, for example) easy parallelization of a request can make the web a more effective compute engine.
I'm guessing VPS/cloud providers will like this one. You can already pack a lot of memory and SSD drives into a server so CPU was becoming a bit of a bottleneck.
That doesn't invalidate your theory, but I don't think it applies to this particular submission.
I've seen it a few times before when $wellKnownProgrammer has an article hit the top of HN, then their next several blog posts all seem to hit the front page before everyone fatigues of it. I'm guessing certain people and sites become "flavors of the month" for both submitters and upvoters, but maybe HN has the stats to figure it out.
Sometimes the meta-game is more fun than the actual game.