
Intel Refreshes 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable, Slashes Prices - rbanffy
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-xeon-scalable-slashes-prices/
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rubyn00bie
I'm sort of amazed they haven't dropped prices more; I guess they can still
charge a premium to anyone who wants their AVX512 (? I think that's it)
performance to be as high as it can be. Otherwise, most of these processors
have already had an epyc shit taken on them.

I was just again pricing processors and if that 7302 isn't the real killer in
the Epyc lineup I dunno what is. It craps on pretty much anything and
everything Intel has, and is only about $1100 right now (pricing is inflated,
but meh).

It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days;
sure, it's not in a data center or if it is that's a headache of its own...
but it is really fucking cheap. I personally think a lot of mid-sized orgs
could benefit from moving a lot of their non-production environments to an on-
prem server. The VPN is probably already locking people out, causing
connection headaches anyway, so it's not like you're gonna have less
connectivity than you did ;-)

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zelcon
Public cloud is a giant scam to make sure 80% of VC money trickles back up to
the big three. Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a
single threaded C++ server. But that's not cool and trendy. You're supposed to
pretend that you could suddenly become Google overnight, so you need The
Cloud(TM), microservices, and all kinds of redundant garbage.

~~~
lordofgibbons
Great. Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile
backend written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how
long it took to secure and set up and maintain the server.

Startups do, and always should, focus on getting to market faster so they can
get feedback from real customers.

I will take going to market faster over saving a few dollars on server costs
everytime I'm given the choice.

Mature products' and companies' use cases are more nuanced.

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rhizome
> _Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile backend
> written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how long
> it took to secure and set up and maintain the server._

Let's not go crazy, Apache on metal is a very simple setup and at least as
secure as S3 out of the box. Platform spread and simplicity are just lost
concepts, that's all.

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gumby
I'm not sure it'd even be possible to run Apache on bare metal; it has too
many dependencies on OS facilities.

I'm curious if people are running bare metal web servers. I'd think there's
enough lookup, modules etc that it wouldn't be worth it (small embedded
applications like IoT frobs excepted)

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idclip
Bare metal just means not a VM. The machine still has an OS.

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gumby
That doesn’t even make sense. Wouldn’t that be “non-virtualized”?

“Bare metal” has meant right on the bare hardware (silicon) since the 1960s. I
don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use that expression in any other way.

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apk-d
Not really a cloud developer, so I looked up a couple of links and I haven't
been able to find any uses of the term _other_ than referring to a single-
tenant machine that you have complete control over, as opposed to virtualized
solutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-
metal_server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server)
[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/hosting-
solutio...](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/hosting-solutions)
[https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/know-how/bare-
meta...](https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/know-how/bare-metal-
servers-definition-and-structure/) [https://www.rackspace.com/library/what-is-
a-bare-metal-serve...](https://www.rackspace.com/library/what-is-a-bare-metal-
server)

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snovv_crash
For web, yes. For embedded systems, "bare metal" means running without an OS.

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thawaway1837
That’s both correct and irrelevant because this entire thread is about running
Apache, which is clearly about the web, considering Apache is a web server.

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idclip
You know whats funny? If be excited to see Apache run embedded on hardware.

This comment is claiming way too many victims. Shame, it'd be a rather
exciting experiment!

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bitcharmer
Too little, too late.

After years of ruthlessly milking us I just hope they loose a big market share
and become equals with AMD. The consumers can only benefit from that.

~~~
1e-9
I whole-heartedly welcome AMD's new offerings and have completely switched to
buying servers with AMD CPUs, but I have to disagree with the characterization
of "ruthless milking" by intel. There was no instituted monopoly here. Others
were free to compete, but they failed. Intel's high prices motivated AMD to
create something better and now they have. If anything, the high pricing was a
screwup on intel's part and good for the consumer. Intel could have better
protected their lead by charging less (but not as less as now) to discourage
competition. I'm glad they didn't, even though it cost me for the last few
years. Now that there is a valid competitor again, maybe we will see better
conformance to Moore's Law.

Edit: To clarify, I will not argue that intel has a clean record of
competitiveness. My point is that they didn't "ruthlessly milk" the consumer
with high prices. Instead, they stuck a knife in their own back by charging
excessively high prices without sufficiently innovating. This created an
opportunity for AMD and motivated them to create something better.

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msbarnett
> Others were free to compete, but they failed.

This is...not accurate. Extensive cross-licensing agreements between AMD and
Intel formed over the years are the only thing that permit AMD to compete. New
competitors are effectively locked out of the x86-64 market entirely at this
point. There is a decided lack of freedom to compete in this market at the
moment.

Intel has also been found to have illegally engaged in anticompetitive
measures on a number of occasions in order to lock AMD out of competing in
many market segments.

~~~
ColanR
So maybe it's time to create a successor to x86-64. Nobody is preventing that
from happening.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Depending on what qualifies, ARM is there today, or will be soon if Apple has
anything to say about it.

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saagarjha
Apple's not really in the server market, though.

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gigatexal
Isn’t competition great?

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dmix
You certainly can’t tell by the amount of people getting hyper sensitive in
this thread.

~~~
gigatexal
Yeah super weird why people have such visceral reactions to this. It’s beyond
my post grade. Likely something to do with tribalism and do sports teams with
intel being one team and amd being another

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anonsivalley652
Milan should be released within a month, ahead of the NDA roadmap like Rome
was. I hope pricing is cut more on Rome when it's released, because I'm
currently building a Supermicro home virtualization server/workstation.

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NicoJuicy
I wonder how many "microservice in the cloud" applications could run on a 8-16
node raspberry cluster and 1 dedicated database server.

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
Competition works.

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sneak
I can’t wait until this happens with last-mile internet access too, and, in a
funny twist of circumstance, quality electric cars.

What other long-moated industries are going to crack open in the next half-
dozen years?

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jchw
Honest question: do you think Teslas are, on the whole, overpriced? I am
neither an owner nor an expert in electric cars, but I have been routinely
impressed with the rate at which the price has come down. I don’t doubt that
the $35k Model 3 configuration is probably non-sensical (at $35k minimum spec
seems silly) but also it seems pretty competitive for an electric car that can
replace a gas car. My personal hunch has always been that the price for
relatively cheap Tesla configurations that make sense probably are limited by
volume and initial cost of R&D and scaling up manufacturing. (Of course almost
any company does some market segmentation for better or worse, so I’m sure the
prices of options are non-sense.)

Not to say the prices won’t go down. But I actually didn’t think the reason
they were high was due to mature, moated companies. My personal belief is that
Tesla would be foolish to rest on their success in such a way when other
companies with a lot more resources are surely going to be competing more
competently soon.

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sneak
No, I don’t think they are super overpriced, I just think the quality isn’t
there yet. Hopefully we can see higher quality all-electric options at similar
or lower price points.

Tesla’s service reputation is the main reason I still currently drive an ICE.
(Before that, it was their laggy touchscreen - my gas guzzler has an iPad on a
bracket on the dash, which does not lag.). Also I’m never going to drive
something that spies on me; I had the GSM radio transceiver removed from my
current vehicle.

AIUI if you do that to a Tesla you never receive future updates, even to
features you paid for in advance.

More competition in the EV market is going to be awesome. Right now it’s just
a bloodbath where Tesla can basically do whatever they want, because until
very recently every other EV was simply hot garbage.

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cptskippy
You've never owned an EV but you're perpetuating the notion that they're of
__unspecified __poor quality compared to ICE vehicles?

I have a Nissan Leaf and a Tesla Model 3 and both are of comparable quality to
ICE vehicles. They are in two different categories in terms of materials
finish but neither is bad quality. The fit and finish of both is average to
above average in the industry.

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sneak
I’ve driven several different instances of every model of Tesla and I’ve
toured their California factory. I am well acquainted with what Teslas are and
are not.

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cptskippy
You made a blanket statement about EVs as a whole and didn't qualify it in any
way.

So what's poor quality about Tesla's? An what's your basis for comparison?

