Now that AMD has closed the gap, and passed Intel’s per core performance in the 16-core CPU market, it has a platform with more RAM capacity and more PCIe lanes along with more performance than the Intel Xeon Gold 6142M, at around a quarter of the price.
What does Intel have so far up its sleeve that AMD has to virtually give away its chips like this?
My background is in the FPGA industry which gives an absolutely fantastic example of this exact dynamic. FPGA companies produce a new generation of chips every 3-5 years or so. There are only two companies, with market share split 60:40. In the last 2 decades we've seen one produce a fantastic product and the other screw up, and then it flips, and then it flips back. Over that time the market share of these companies went 60:40, 62:38, 58:42, 60:40. The actual number of customers who switch to the better product is tiny. Why?
* All the existing knowledge in the company is about one platform, it's incredibly expensive to develop the skills on the other toolchain. Port all your software etc.
* The existing products are all from one vendor so you save loads of effort if all the products are basically similar.
* There are existing relationships with the company you're with.
* You know that if you do switch, all that cost of switching may result in only a few years of using the better product.
* The IP you're buying works better with the vendor you're currently on.
* You don't know what the real world performance will actually be for your application.
So yeah, you could move from Intel to AMD, but the chip is only a tiny part of that cost.
It's probably more that they're clearing out the old chips before launching their 7nm-based Zen2 Epyc chips next quarter. They've already sampled out to hyperscalers.
But, generally, Epyc does have some deficiencies. It's essentially NUMA-on-a-package, and each NUMA node is itself essentially a pair of 4-core processors jammed together (each with its own cache, with all the usual problems that brings). That doesn't work for everything... for example GPGPU compute doesn't really like to be split across NUMA. Inter-core and memory latency is also much higher than on Intel platforms. Intel is playing with much larger building blocks, their die is 28C and they can scale up to 8 sockets, while AMD has 32C per package they can only scale up to 2 sockets because they are actually four dies inside already (both systems scale to 8 dies).
A lot of stuff is fine with those tradeoffs, particularly the stuff you use server processors for. And it's pretty cute if you want a lot of storage or lanes. And it's pretty cheap to manufacture due to their smaller dies (although of course TCO is much larger than just the cost of the CPU). But it's not for everyone.
Next quarter they're moving to 8 dies in a package, on 7nm, with updated AVX2 and probably support for the AVX-512 instruction set (at half throughput).
Why do you think $1500 for a 16 core part is giving it away? There was a time not long ago where $1500 for an intel xeon was a solidly high-end part. This part is really nice, but it looks pretty low end when compared with dual socket machines with 128 cores.
Its likely AMD is making a healthy profit on it and has an estimate about how much of the market they are going to gain by significantly undercutting intel vs the profits per part. AKA if knocking 10-20% off their proffit increases their market by 30-40% its a no-brainer.
Brand value, I guess? All AMD hardware (CPUs and GPUs) I've bought in the past was crap, I'm never buying anything from them again, no matter what they do. It's always the same: on paper they are better and cheaper, but once I have them at home they are worse and, in case of the GPUs, they have pathetic drivers. I've always felt ripped off after buying AMD, it's never worth it just to save some pennies.
This has been my experience, I wonder if others have felt the same.
I can't wait for DO to offer EPYC, or hopefully Zen 2 as they are very close to launch. I need more CPU Core but instead most of the Cloud Vendor offer me 1 Core ( Actually 1 Thread ) and 2GB Memory. I would much rather see a 1:1 Core and Memory Config.
Great point about core frequency being important for per-core licensing.
I wonder if any software with per-core licensing has tried to take a possibly 'fairer' approach, for example by summing the frequency of all cores? E.g. 4x cores at 2GHz is 8GHz?
It's not that straightforward a comparison, I know, just wondering if anyone has tried something different here.
SQL Server switched from CPU-based licensing to core-based licensing as of their 2012 version and they included a "core factor" that reduced licensing costs if you were running on AMD cores to 75% of the cost for Intel cores to account for AMD's then-lower per-core performance.
OT, but isn't the entire "per core" licensing scheme completely absurd for many products?
Since we know that in any significant system the effects of latencies in various cache hierarchies, buses, networks, storage, and cross process synchronization makes enormous difference in performance it's easy to see the CPU performance alone is not really a good predictor of system performance.
Thus, with a price calculated per CPU core the solution space narrows significantly, and experience tells us that solutions where per core licensing is involved tend to include expensive, hard to support networking and storage hardware which few would buy if not per core licensing had taken that option away.
If you want to charge per unit of work, then figure out how to do just that, and don't charge for what is effectively a theoretical peak unit of load?
Intel will likely respond with the minimum amount of changes that combined with their brand inertia will result in maximum revenue for them.
That, at first, will likely seem like the "rational" way to balance this "new competition" from AMD with keeping investors happy, but they're forgetting one thing -- in that equation the "brand inertia" they love to take advantage of is going to erode with each such "minimal response", until there is none or very little left.
What I'm trying to say is that consumers will put up with a company releasing sub-par/low-value products because they "trust the brand" only for so long, before they give in and start embracing the competition's brands -- as they should.
I mean, unless you, as a consumer, suffer from the Stockholm syndrome, you shouldn't be rewarding Intel for being forced to lower prices on some of its products or add more cores, just like you shouldn't have rewarded Comcast for offering fiber in places where Google Fiber arrived. You should be rewarding the competitor that caused that to happen -- that is if you'd still like that competition to continue in the future.
In Google Fiber's case, that competition disappeared because people were unwilling to reward it and stuck with Comcast/AT&T. And now they'll suffer from it for another decade or so, until another major disruption/competition appears (SpaceX satellites maybe?).
Nobody is selling them in quantities/systems that could in any way threaten Intel. AMD might have a great tech right now (and possibly even better with Zen 2), but it won't help them financially if nobody can buy them or only in overall inferior offerings to Intel ones. EPYC has still a lot to overcome in DC/server space. I am happy with my TR in a Deep Learning machine, all the PCIe lanes for multiple GPUs are giving me insane value, however server contracts are way more complicated than enthusiast space and Intel has a firm ground there.
So what happened to intel that they’re now no longer way ahead in both performance and manufacturing technology? They’re being squeezed from all sides, and don’t seem to be pulling ahead...
They stumbled on 10nm is what happened. They expected their manufacturing prowess to continue to let them build massive dies.
So now they're stuck with CPU architecture designs that mandate huge dies to scale up the core counts, which they can't manufacture with anything close to reasonable yields on 14nm.
Rock meet hard place.
AMD by contrast designed with the expectation that they couldn't make big chips, so went with a "glue a bunch of small ones together" design. Which seems to have played out stunningly well for them. Now they can bin the golden cores, slap them together, and ramp the clocks.
It's not so much Intel were ahead in terms of architecture design, but rather AMD was way behind. Bulldozer was a disaster, and Zen is a ground-up redesign that means AMD have a decent core at the level of Intel's again.
But AMD have two advantages Intel don't. Their Zen architecture is designed for multi-chip module scalability, so they can deliver higher core counts at much better yields (especially important on new process nodes!) and thus manufacturing costs than Intel's monolithic designs. And AMD uses 3rd-party fabs that, unlike Intel, are already doing great on the new process node.
As others have pointed out, it's not entirely about Intel doing badly, but rather Intel putting out a mediocre performance and AMD finally really succeeding.
And while the various technical reasons for that are interesting, I do think that at least some of the credit/blame needs to go to the leadership. AMD had a string of bad leadership that led to the company to near bankruptcy, but then they hired Lisa Su, who is basically a superstar engineer-turned-manager who has excelled in everything she's touched, from doing very low-level transistor research to being the leader of large teams (and now the entire company). At the same time, Intel hasn't actually had a good CEO for a long while now, with the top leadership in the company chasing the latest fads and spending billions on weird acquisitions that only get written off later, while the key areas of the business are not doing nearly as well as they did under their predecessors.
Next iteration is hard. Breakthroughs are even harder. When Intel (or whoever) does it, they will have years of advantage - unless the information leaks. (And it probably will. At the latest when the true next gen will hit the shelves.)
Other than that, it's business as usual. News are just shiny mirrors, spectacle. We still don't know how durable AMD's "luck" is, how sales and stock price and other relevant numbers will ebb and flow, and so on.
Small nitpick, but if I'm reading this correctly, the EPYC 7371 is a 16-core part. The Threadripper 2950x with 16 cores and the 2970wx with 24 cores both have full speed memory access for all cores. It is only the 32 core 2990wx that has half the cores running without direct access to memory. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
If AMD came out with a platform with decent power/battery/performance and ECC memory available in a laptop it would go to the front of my next purchase list.
I have the thinkpad a485 with ryzen pro. It supports ECC but I haven't tried that yet.
I would hold out though. AMD is really bad at managing drivers for the video card. It's supposed to be fixed soon new, but there is also a new chip on the horizon.
Battery life is about 8 to 10 hours depending on what I'm doing.
> AMD EPYC 7371 Pricing Update [Is] An Insane Value
Off topic, but I can't take it anymore. Enough with "it's a good value". "A" good value? "Excellence deserves admiration" is a good value. $1550 for an EPYC 7371 is just ... good value.
> AMD EPYC 7371 Pricing Update [Is] Insanely Good Value
And what would be an Insane value? Something like "I want to see my enemies driven before me, hear the lamentations of their women," something like that? :)
[+] [-] zaroth|7 years ago|reply
What does Intel have so far up its sleeve that AMD has to virtually give away its chips like this?
[+] [-] Traster|7 years ago|reply
* All the existing knowledge in the company is about one platform, it's incredibly expensive to develop the skills on the other toolchain. Port all your software etc.
* The existing products are all from one vendor so you save loads of effort if all the products are basically similar.
* There are existing relationships with the company you're with.
* You know that if you do switch, all that cost of switching may result in only a few years of using the better product.
* The IP you're buying works better with the vendor you're currently on.
* You don't know what the real world performance will actually be for your application.
So yeah, you could move from Intel to AMD, but the chip is only a tiny part of that cost.
[+] [-] drewg123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulmd|7 years ago|reply
But, generally, Epyc does have some deficiencies. It's essentially NUMA-on-a-package, and each NUMA node is itself essentially a pair of 4-core processors jammed together (each with its own cache, with all the usual problems that brings). That doesn't work for everything... for example GPGPU compute doesn't really like to be split across NUMA. Inter-core and memory latency is also much higher than on Intel platforms. Intel is playing with much larger building blocks, their die is 28C and they can scale up to 8 sockets, while AMD has 32C per package they can only scale up to 2 sockets because they are actually four dies inside already (both systems scale to 8 dies).
A lot of stuff is fine with those tradeoffs, particularly the stuff you use server processors for. And it's pretty cute if you want a lot of storage or lanes. And it's pretty cheap to manufacture due to their smaller dies (although of course TCO is much larger than just the cost of the CPU). But it's not for everyone.
Next quarter they're moving to 8 dies in a package, on 7nm, with updated AVX2 and probably support for the AVX-512 instruction set (at half throughput).
[+] [-] StillBored|7 years ago|reply
Its likely AMD is making a healthy profit on it and has an estimate about how much of the market they are going to gain by significantly undercutting intel vs the profits per part. AKA if knocking 10-20% off their proffit increases their market by 30-40% its a no-brainer.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirekrusin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vrazj|7 years ago|reply
This has been my experience, I wonder if others have felt the same.
[+] [-] altmind|7 years ago|reply
the lead time for intel desktop models(i7-9700) is months. i know that enterprise vendors are also experiencing intel cpu shortages and long wait times. Some discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9ea8y2/intel_cant...
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if any software with per-core licensing has tried to take a possibly 'fairer' approach, for example by summing the frequency of all cores? E.g. 4x cores at 2GHz is 8GHz?
It's not that straightforward a comparison, I know, just wondering if anyone has tried something different here.
[+] [-] dhd415|7 years ago|reply
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/c/73cad4e0-d0b5-4...
[+] [-] lostmyoldone|7 years ago|reply
Since we know that in any significant system the effects of latencies in various cache hierarchies, buses, networks, storage, and cross process synchronization makes enormous difference in performance it's easy to see the CPU performance alone is not really a good predictor of system performance.
Thus, with a price calculated per CPU core the solution space narrows significantly, and experience tells us that solutions where per core licensing is involved tend to include expensive, hard to support networking and storage hardware which few would buy if not per core licensing had taken that option away.
If you want to charge per unit of work, then figure out how to do just that, and don't charge for what is effectively a theoretical peak unit of load?
[+] [-] snuxoll|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gameswithgo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nik736|7 years ago|reply
AMD is doing really well.
[+] [-] mtgx|7 years ago|reply
That, at first, will likely seem like the "rational" way to balance this "new competition" from AMD with keeping investors happy, but they're forgetting one thing -- in that equation the "brand inertia" they love to take advantage of is going to erode with each such "minimal response", until there is none or very little left.
What I'm trying to say is that consumers will put up with a company releasing sub-par/low-value products because they "trust the brand" only for so long, before they give in and start embracing the competition's brands -- as they should.
I mean, unless you, as a consumer, suffer from the Stockholm syndrome, you shouldn't be rewarding Intel for being forced to lower prices on some of its products or add more cores, just like you shouldn't have rewarded Comcast for offering fiber in places where Google Fiber arrived. You should be rewarding the competitor that caused that to happen -- that is if you'd still like that competition to continue in the future.
In Google Fiber's case, that competition disappeared because people were unwilling to reward it and stuck with Comcast/AT&T. And now they'll suffer from it for another decade or so, until another major disruption/competition appears (SpaceX satellites maybe?).
[+] [-] bitL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kllrnohj|7 years ago|reply
So now they're stuck with CPU architecture designs that mandate huge dies to scale up the core counts, which they can't manufacture with anything close to reasonable yields on 14nm.
Rock meet hard place.
AMD by contrast designed with the expectation that they couldn't make big chips, so went with a "glue a bunch of small ones together" design. Which seems to have played out stunningly well for them. Now they can bin the golden cores, slap them together, and ramp the clocks.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|7 years ago|reply
But AMD have two advantages Intel don't. Their Zen architecture is designed for multi-chip module scalability, so they can deliver higher core counts at much better yields (especially important on new process nodes!) and thus manufacturing costs than Intel's monolithic designs. And AMD uses 3rd-party fabs that, unlike Intel, are already doing great on the new process node.
2019 will be a reckoning for Intel.
[+] [-] Tuna-Fish|7 years ago|reply
And while the various technical reasons for that are interesting, I do think that at least some of the credit/blame needs to go to the leadership. AMD had a string of bad leadership that led to the company to near bankruptcy, but then they hired Lisa Su, who is basically a superstar engineer-turned-manager who has excelled in everything she's touched, from doing very low-level transistor research to being the leader of large teams (and now the entire company). At the same time, Intel hasn't actually had a good CEO for a long while now, with the top leadership in the company chasing the latest fads and spending billions on weird acquisitions that only get written off later, while the key areas of the business are not doing nearly as well as they did under their predecessors.
[+] [-] Twirrim|7 years ago|reply
Then Zen happened, and this current resurgence.
Companies aren't dead until they're dead. Intel has fingers in a lot of pies and good revenue streams from all over the place.
[+] [-] pas|7 years ago|reply
Other than that, it's business as usual. News are just shiny mirrors, spectacle. We still don't know how durable AMD's "luck" is, how sales and stock price and other relevant numbers will ebb and flow, and so on.
[+] [-] Shorel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwmcsween|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joncrane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llampx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soulnothing|7 years ago|reply
I would hold out though. AMD is really bad at managing drivers for the video card. It's supposed to be fixed soon new, but there is also a new chip on the horizon.
Battery life is about 8 to 10 hours depending on what I'm doing.
[+] [-] loeg|7 years ago|reply
Now, does anyone sell them in a laptop, with ECC memory? I have no idea. But that's the APU (CPU+GPU) mobile part you'd want.
[+] [-] conanthe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|7 years ago|reply
Off topic, but I can't take it anymore. Enough with "it's a good value". "A" good value? "Excellence deserves admiration" is a good value. $1550 for an EPYC 7371 is just ... good value.
> AMD EPYC 7371 Pricing Update [Is] Insanely Good Value
[+] [-] llampx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingaling|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vtesucks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] StellaQueen|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]