
AMD’s aggressive pricing update on the EPYC 7371 - vanburen
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7371-pricing-update-an-insane-value/
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zaroth
_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?

~~~
Traster
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.

~~~
agumonkey
I almost know zero about FPGA market but it seems that it's infinitely harder
to port programs between FPGAs than from CPUs.

Other than that thanks for the insights, interesting facts.

~~~
gameswithgo
That is probably generally true but if you have some serious compute workloads
that you specialized for your server's CPU it could be hard to port between
AMD and Intel as well. When people have customized the code for particular
cache sizes, SIMD instruction sets, core counts, throttling schemes, ram
throughput, and branch predictors and so on.

~~~
agumonkey
It's quite true, but what I've heard from FPGA users is that toolchain and
conventions are aliens to each others, I think these are both two different
kinds of hell. I don't know what would cost more to a company.

~~~
ohyes
When you deliver an FPGA you’re normally also making your own hardware. That’s
a big part of the FPGA porting cost, you have to redesign your boards. I don’t
think the same is generally true in the x86 realm. Even if you’re specifically
using some feature of the intel micro architecture it’s still essentially a
code change rather than an full redesign.

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altmind
not only amd is providing a good performance, value and features(omg, so many
pci lanes), amd can actually deliver their chips without the wait.

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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9ea8y2/intel_cant_supply_14nm_xeons_hpe_directly/)

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ksec
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.

~~~
chrisper
If you need that many cores why don't you get a dedicated server?

~~~
ksec
I don't need that many core as in 64 Core or 128vCPU. I just hope we get
better pricing on Core Count. Now I do want a Dedicated Server but having
Cloud / VM is much easier for Scaling. It would have been great if there are
CloudVM provider that has Dedicated Server as Baseline, but so far only Vultr
has it.

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GordonS
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.

~~~
dhd415
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.

[http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/c/73cad4e0-d0b5-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/c/73cad4e0-d0b5-4be5-ab49-d5b886a5ae00/sql_server_2012_licensing_reference_guide.pdf)

~~~
polskibus
Are you sure that lower core factor applies to EPYC ? The document
[http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/5/445627B4-9AB0-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/5/445627B4-9AB0-4AED-
BCCD-C7AC5ADAF6B2/CoreFactorTable_4_1_2014.pdf)

mentions only old Opterons.

~~~
dhd415
That applied only to certain AMD CPUs that were available in 2012. It's just
an example in which there was some effort to take a "fairer" approach to per-
core licensing. It's especially notable since the EPYC line is evidence of the
great strides that AMD has made since then when MS just gave you a blanket
discount for running SQL Server on AMD cores.

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nik736
Will be interesting to see the Intel response.

AMD is doing really well.

~~~
bitL
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.

~~~
jaxtellerSoA
Amazon, Microsoft, and Baidu would have to disagree with you, since they all
have already done large Epyc implementations.

Also, I can go on CDW right now and get an Epyc server, no problem.

Availability isn't an issue for AMD.

~~~
bitL
...and that's why AMD didn't miss revenue forecasts, right? EPYC was pretty
anemic, I would have expected an explosion in sales with such a product, not
the underwhelming sales performance it experienced. There are obviously other
factors holding it back.

How do you know AWS/Azure etc. aren't using them just for price haggling with
Intel, as it was done with AMD in the past all the time? The fact you can get
EPYC servers doesn't mean they are wide-spread anyway.

~~~
jaxtellerSoA
>I would have expected an explosion in sales with such a product

That is just unrealistic expectations in the server space. These aren't
consumer products where adoption is fast. Business don't upgrade their
infrastructure as quickly as consumers, and when they do decided to upgrade it
is months of planning. No company is going to jump ship to AMD when their
current servers aren't fully depreciated by their accounting standards, and
they still have several years left on their support contracts.

The EPYC sales will come, but not overnight.

EDIT: And I am not sure why are are so disappointed here. Epyc sales and
adoption has been in-line with what AMD has given as guidance. Why would you
expect adoption to wildly exceed AMD's own guidance? I think AMD had
aggressive but realistic guidance and so far Epyc has been great success and
will only continue to chip away at Intel. Also not sure what revenue miss you
are referring to. Overall AMD beat their expected earnings per share by 1 cent
last quarter. If there was a slight miss on the Epyc sales then they made up
for it somewhere else, but it must not have been a very big miss otherwise
they would have missed the EPS target.

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azinman2
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...

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
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.

2019 will be a reckoning for Intel.

~~~
dragontamer
> Bulldozer was a disaster

I dunno if it was as much a "disaster" as it was Intel's Sandy Bridge doing so
well.

Intel's Sandy Bridge (2600k / 2700k) were HUGE improvements back in 2011.
Bulldozer was a step-wider (the cores were roughly the same as K10 but you'd
get 8-cores instead of 4), and Piledriver / Steamroller incrementally improved
on the formula.

Bulldozer managed to increase core counts from ~4 (AMD Phenom) to 8 with
Bulldozer. Sure, the 8 "cores" of Bulldozer shared a decoder and perhaps was
more appropriately a 4-core with hyperthreading... but it was still a core-to-
core improvement compared to K10.

[https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-
over...](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-
overclocking,3584.html)

But the incremental upgrades to AMD's K10 were just no match for the 20%+
boosts that Intel was doing with their Sandy Bridge architecture. Ultimately,
Intel's Hyperthreads (4c/8t) were roughly the same as AMD's "8 core
(4-decoders)" setup... because Sandy Bridge was just so far ahead of the game.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Bulldozer was less performant than its predecessor once you factor in the
process node. That's why it was a disaster: AMD managed to design a _worse_
processor and were stuck with it for years. They did make it less bad over
time, but it still sucked.

~~~
MrRadar
This. Bulldozer was (ironically) AMD's Netburst moment. They made a
speculative play ("modules" in the case of Bulldozer, long pipelines in the
case of Netburst) to chase high core counts/clock speeds (respectively) and
the technology didn't end up panning out like they expected on top of
performing worse out-of-the-gate than the architectures they were meant to
succeed.

The difference is that Intel had the cash and political clout to wait out
Netburst and force the market to take it while Bulldozer nearly killed AMD
(which only held on thanks to its GPU division, itself now in crisis due to
lack of competitive products due to under-investment).

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nwmcsween
AMD needs to go as low as possible, get a foothold in the server market then
start increasing prices.

~~~
joncrane
They already have a foothold in the server market: AWS just released new
families of instance types based on AMD CPUs.

------
gigatexal
Great value here. All modules get full memory bandwidth versus the desktop
chips. I’d get one for sure.

~~~
llampx
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.

~~~
gigatexal
You could be right. I was under the impression that all mainstream parts even
the threadripper ones were artificially handicapped.

~~~
duhast
EPYC supports up to 8 memory channels where as Threadripper only 4.

~~~
loeg
Sure, but that's 32-core EPYC (4 dies, each die has 2 channels). Does this
16-core part use 2 dies or 4 dies (with half of each die's cores crippled)?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
All EPYC cpus support 8 memory channels, and the full set of PCI-E lanes. AMD
has chosen to segment the market so that every CPU plugged into every existing
SP3 MB can make full use of all it's features.

This CPU has 4 dies, each of which have 2 CCX, each of which have 2 cores and
8MB of cache.

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mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
soulnothing
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.

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conanthe
For realtime audio processing Intel still bears the crown. Hopefully AMD will
get closer so that Intel get on improving.

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leoc
> 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

~~~
llampx
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?
:)

~~~
twic
You'd have to ask Crazy Eddie
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yYGoO5imyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yYGoO5imyY)

~~~
berbec
Iirc, his prices were irs-trouble insane

