
Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8284 CPU: When 300 MHz Cost $5,500 - varshithr
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14656/intels-xeon-platinum-8284-cpu-when-300-mhz-cost-5500
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noir_lord
It's going to be interesting to see what the new AMD 'Rome' brings to the
table when it gets into peoples hands.

upto 64 Cores/128 Threads and 128 PCI express lanes (that's on all of them
irrespective of the core count) - 8 channel memory.

Given AMD's insanely aggressive pricing on the Zen 2 consumer line I'm
expecting a proper knockdown drag out fight.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
My biggest question is... what percentage of the market is really buying the
latest generation of processors upon release? Gamers, sure. I'd imagine the
number of "every day use" laptops sold is a lot larger than people trying to
eek out the last few frames per second. Would these budget machines also have
this new advanced AMD CPU? How long does it take "the kind of laptops you pick
up at Walmart" to deprecate old CPUs and implement new ones?

~~~
old-gregg
Majority of data center users replace their gear within 3-5 years. There are
outliers, of course, who replace hardware with each generation or those who
run their servers into the ground, but 3-5 years is far more common, so 4
years on average.

This rough math means if AMD takes half of the new CPU orders, they should
have about 10% server CPU market share within a year, consistent with some
analyst estimates [1]

[1]
[https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190328PD200.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190328PD200.html)

~~~
noir_lord
AMD couldn’t have timed bringing a genuinely competitive product to market
either on the backside of the Meltdown and MDS and Intel struggling on
process.

Will be interesting to see if intel begin pulling the same kind of shenanigans
they did back the last AMD was competitive (early Opteron/Athlon days).

I don’t think the market structure is the same and given they got slapped for
it last time by the regulators I’m curious to see if they’ll try.

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sgillen
I'm having a hard time figuring out who would be buying this. Only thing I can
think of is that the chip has some extra features not really advertised that
the customer needed.

~~~
x0x0
$5k is barely a 1 week fully loaded cost for an experienced SSE.

If I can spend $5k to save a week of optimization work, it's a good deal. Also
buying clockspeed can't create new bugs either, which is a risk with any code
change.

~~~
monsieurbanana
> Also buying clockspeed can't create new bugs

Famous last words

~~~
skunkworker
> Also clockspeed buying can't new create bugs.

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mbell
$5,500 doesn't matter in this context which is why the pricing is structured
this way. This is destine for a server in a datacenter, the cost of the
hardware is pretty much a blip in comparison to rackspace, power and
networking costs.

This largely comes down to a problem of folks assuming that 'price' is
correlated strongly with 'cost'. It's not and never has been.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I assure you that $5500 is a substantial addition to the TCO of buying and
running the server.

The reason these parts exists is for optimising for expensive software that's
charged per core. For the same performance bump, you can add two cores and pay
Intel $2000 and Oracle $10000, or you can buy a chip clocked higher and pay
Intel $5000.

~~~
mbell
> I assure you that $5500 is a substantial addition to the TCO of buying and
> running the server.

I assure you it's not. This thing is going to go into a 2U server, which is
going to run ~$400 month for the rackspace, power and bandwidth. It's also not
going to be purchased by folks building their own stuff from Newegg based on
supermicro chassis and misc parts, it's going to be bought from Dell and HP as
one part of the expense of a $30k+ server.

Could I build something cheaper and find cheap local colo to make it a
'significant' portion of TCO? Yes, doesn't change anything about the reality
that this is not the target market so it makes no sense to be concerned about
the cost in such a market. TBH if this segment of the market is your concern,
you should buy a threadripper and hope the ECC ram you bought works with it.
But, it's not the same market.

~~~
reitzensteinm
The numbers you're quoting don't match your claims. You said "the cost of the
hardware is pretty much a blip in comparison to rackspace, power and
networking costs."

Then once you start listing numbers, the server costs $30k+ and the data
center $400/mo. I'm pretty sure that $30k for a server is not a "blip" on
($30k + $15k) assuming a three year lifetime.

Trying to make out like I'm coming it from some kind of hobbyist market
segment point of view is a puzzling straw man. These products, which optimize
for performance over performance/TCO$, are built with very valid niches in
mind, and where the math works out it saves you a ton of money in software
licensing or software development.

They are not, as you seem to be claiming, positioned as sensible choices for
wide deployment in datacenters. If that were the case, _why bother with the
rest of the SKUs_!?

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auggierose
Hmm, isn't the new Mac pro up to 28 cores? :-D

~~~
blackflame7000
I built a dev computer out of some old Xeon E5-2670 V2s (10cores/20threads
@2.5ghz) each. I thought it would be way faster than a single core i7 4 core
at 4.5ghz. To my surprise, only a few special types of things are the 20 core
machine faster than the 4 core machine.

~~~
snazz
Did you find that `make -j20` (or -j40 if you have a total of 40 threads) was
five times faster (ish) than the quad-core machine?

~~~
gattr
My tangentially related experience: when I switched (after 4 years) from a
Core i5-3570K (4C/8T, 3.4 GHz nominal) to a Ryzen 7 1700X (8C/16T, 3.4 GHz
nominal) last year, multi-threaded build time of a smallish C++ project I work
on went down from 1 minute to 30 seconds.

I'd really like a comparable speed-up on my next HW upgrade; hoping for
affordable 16-core CPUs 3-4 years from now.

~~~
hak8or
The 3570k is not hyper threaded from what I understand. If it was, I would
have been thrilled because I am still using that professor myself, waiting for
the new threadripper.

~~~
gattr
Of course, my mistake.

I also updated the 1700X to 2700 this year, the "marginality problem" ([0])
affecting some of the early Ryzens (random segfaults after some minutes of
heavily parallel workloads with lots of process creation - e.g. builds!) was
getting more annoying when Rust needed to download and compile a bunch of
crates. I'm very satisfied - more or less the same performance (3.2 vs 3.4
GHz), but 65 W instead of 95 W TDP.

[0] [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-
Se...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Segv-
Response)

