
Intel can’t supply 14nm Xeons, HPE recommends AMD Epyc - davidgerard
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/09/07/intel-cant-supply-14nm-xeons-hpe-directly-recommends-amd-epyc/
======
gumby
I really think Intel lost its way back in the Barrett era and never managed to
find it (and I think AMD is really significantly exceeding its historical
trend line right now) but despite all that I am dubious about semiaccurate.

Looking back at other submissions from that site (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=semiaccurate.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=semiaccurate.com)
) it appears many HN readers are too. Based (only) on the submissions, it
looks a bit like an AMD fan site.

~~~
throwaway2048
Semi accurate most definitely has a big bias against Intel, but they are
pretty open with it. They have a ton of insider information that nobody else
does, there is a reason they have an insanely expensive paywall, and people
gladly pay it.

~~~
C7H8N4O2
> They have a ton of insider information that nobody else does

Are you willing and able to elaborate?

~~~
throwaway2048
They have a (slightly out of date) page on the very topic

[https://www.semiaccurate.com/fullyaccurate/](https://www.semiaccurate.com/fullyaccurate/)

Some things since then, they were the first media outlet to talk about how
Intel's 10nm was a disaster, The first media outlet to talk about Zen chiplet
technology and predict AMD had a homerun on their hands.

~~~
mtgx
They also "predicted" Intel's delays and ultimate failure with Broadwell
(basically a 6-month product), too.

------
zachruss92
Honestly, this seems like another instance of Intel dropping the ball, and AMD
is more than happy to pick up the slack. AMD is already testing their 7nm Epyc
chips with OEMs to be released Q1'19.

My takeaway from this is that server manufacturers are starting to recommend
Epyc is a solution which will increase AMD's market share. This will just
create more competition between Red and Blue which will give consumers faster
innovation and better prices.

------
DeepYogurt
Can anyone explain the shortage of 14nm chips? This article simply mentions
that most readers are aware of this fact and I am unable to find supporting
articles.

~~~
tristanj
[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/14nm-processor-intel-
short...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/14nm-processor-intel-
shortage-9000-series,37746.html)

Because Intel's 10nm process is delayed, their 14nm fab is overbooked leading
to a chip shortage.

~~~
dman
But isnt the positive spin on that they are selling every chip they could
make?

~~~
hajile
No.

Two fabs output more chips than one fab. Intel has deals with other companies
for both 10nm and 14nm production and some of those deals are undoubtedly
based on Intel moving their own chips to 10nm. At capacity and unable to
increase as expected means customers move to other companies that make
compatible, competitive products. Once those companies move, they may not come
back.

This is quite a bad position to be in.

~~~
dman
Are there other companies that are using Intel fabs with real volume?

~~~
chx
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17614930/apple-
iphone-201...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17614930/apple-
iphone-2018-intel-cellular-modems-qualcomm-legal-dispute)

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/14nm-processor-intel-
short...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/14nm-processor-intel-
shortage-9000-series,37746.html)

> That ramp is occurring as Intel is also bringing production of its 14nm XMM
> 7560 modems online for Apple during the second half of this year. The new
> Apple contract, which consists of millions of modems for iPhones, will
> certainly be a top priority at Intel's fabs.

~~~
chasil
I had heard that Apple will be dumping Intel modems after that contract is
complete, with Mediatek the likely new partner. This might have something to
do with the Qualcomm lawsuit over Apple breaking NDAs by sharing sensitive
information with Intel.

Assuming this to be so, Apple may not be allocated the highest priority.

------
acd
Arm chips will most likely replace Intel even for servers. I think we may se
massive core count with lower clocked frequency chips as die shrink will be
come too expensive.

“Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says
that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four
years“
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law)

~~~
vardump
CPU side channel attacks, speculative execution leaks, throttling and cache
effects, might eventually benefit the ARM server camp.

Maybe instead of virtual machines we'll end up running (some) workloads on
cheap, low power and isolated ARM CPUs, directly on bare metal without
potentially leaky virtualization. Something like 4-16 GB of ECC RAM over 1-2
channels, quad core Cortex A73, A76 or similar.

(Some ARMv8 designs are actually not that far behind of x86 chips in scalar
performance anymore. SIMD (vector integer/floating point) is another matter,
but I guess it's not impossible to slap a few 256 or 512 bits wide SIMD units
in ARM designs.)

~~~
gfody
I wonder if AMD has the fortitude to try again after the premature ejaculation
that was
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMicro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMicro)

~~~
djrogers
SeaMicro wasn’t ARM though- it was X86 (intel Atom to be specific).

------
martin1975
Feels a bit like Apple's resurrection from the dead when Jobs came back to
take the helm after having been 'fired'... now AMD is eating Intel's pie left
right and center.

~~~
xattt
Are there specific people that are back at AMD that had not been there during
the last decade?

~~~
martin1975
the new CEO, her name eludes me, a Chinese lady, she's very much responsible
for AMD's recent success and capitalizing on Intel's mistakes

~~~
dragontamer
Wikipedia says Lisa Su is Taiwanese-American.

Rumor is that she's somehow related to NVidia's chief. Like 2nd cousins or 3rd
niece / something-something removed or something of that nature. Just for some
delicious irony.

EDIT: Found it. Jen-Hsun Huang is apparently her Uncle.
[https://babeltechreviews.com/nvidias-ceo-is-the-uncle-of-
amd...](https://babeltechreviews.com/nvidias-ceo-is-the-uncle-of-amds-ceo/)

> Technically, Lisa Su’s grandfather is Jen-Hsun Huang’s uncle. They are not
> exactly niece and uncle, but close relatives.

~~~
ksec
Jen is 表舅, So it should be Lisa Su's mum ( it has to be on her mum's side and
not her dad ) 's Dad or Mother's ( Grand Pa / Grand Ma ) , and their brother
or sisters's son.

------
ItsTotallyOn
Intel used to keep less important products, like chipsets, on trailing nodes
(right now, that's 22nm). Now the company is fabbing the chipsets on 14nm,
too. That's mainly because of the late move to 10nm. Intel's processors SHOULD
be on 10nm, but they aren't, so chipsets are eating into 14nm production
capacity. Intel has to create one chipset for each processor produced (in most
cases), so this adds up to a lot of chips.

------
LinuxBender
How many server models have HP and Dell switched to using Epyc?

~~~
JohannFlobuster
HPE Solution Architect here -- HPE has 4 lines, 3 public / 1 private. DL385
and DL325 are rack based servers aka traditional pizza box.

DL385 is your workhorse platform. DL325 is a 1P design based for heavy PCIe
connected (read: NVMe) devices.

The CL3150 is a cloudline server and will likely be more consumed in the
service provider space, in my opinion.

The Apollo 35 is available to top 200 volume accounts (which has been annouced
publicly, but is not available to your everyday customer.)

This type [of information leak] is my worst nightmare as someone who works
with resellers, letting these types of documents in the wrong hands or somehow
access is breached like this.

Edit 2: I am a server SA, MASE. I configure servers all the time. If customer
demand shows the swap, you _could_ see the proc move over to other lines, such
as blades and the HPC markets.

~~~
old-gregg
Super-curious: have you seen much customer-driven demand for AMD EPYC, i.e.
for reasons other than Xeon availability? AMD processors have been affected to
a lesser degree to speculative execution exploits, they're cheaper and (if I'm
not mistaken) offer more PCIe lanes, etc.

Also, do you expect 7mm EPYC to do well in your space? Thanks!

~~~
JohannFlobuster
Depends on market segement. I've seen alot of demand for Epyc in workloads
that are sensitive to memory bandwidth. Just so much to offer when you max out
8 channels.

They are cheaper due to fabrication process. The PCIe lane story is stuff of
fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat.

Secondly, anyone looking at an NVMe box should be looking at AMD in my
opinion. The trick is if you are doing a VM farm, mixing Intel and AMD aint
the best idea, as you all know.

I see EPYC ticking up fast.

In terms of exploits like Spectre/Meltdown, I'm pretty sure the exploits AMD
claimed were not vulnerable, they ended up pushing out microcode for anyway.
So its a moot point.

I HAVE come across alot of customers who have DOUBLED their core count due to
Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, and they are attracted to AMDs, high core, lower
cost options. But remember, the power draw is different and always test/PoC!

~~~
mmt
> The PCIe lane story is stuff of fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat.

Could you unpack this a bit? Specifically, I'm curious if the cost is a
premium per lane (e.g. W/lane greater on AMD than on Intel) [1]. Also, is that
cost at all affected by the I/O volume or merely the CPU being power-hungry
overall?

[1] Of course, that assumes everything else being equal, which it can't be, as
well as equal proprotion of PCIe utilization, which is unlikely.

~~~
JohannFlobuster
Ive had a few customers test AMD and found a higher operating temp and
determined it was due to higher power consumption. On paper, you get more
lanes at a lower TDP w/ AMD. In practice, as always, your results may vary.
Test!

PCIe lanes and counting them is funny math. Do the homework on system boards,
how they communicate, and the tax of moving information between processors.

However, I would say their tests were short, and AMD processors have 3 power
operating modes. There was also a neat blog posted somewhere (I think on
here...) a little while back suggesting that the AMD proc did not need to run
at advertised power on the customer procs. It was about compile times and how
much power still resulted in good times. That was consumer-grade Ryzen chips
tested though.

~~~
mmt
Unfortunately, higher temperature says less about power and more about thermal
design (often of the overall system and not just the chip).

> On paper, you get more lanes at a lower TDP w/ AMD.

I was hoping you (or anyone) had at least some real-world anecdata.

However, the theoretical power cost being lower suggests it's unlikely that if
there's a premium in practice, it's unlikely to be significant.

> PCIe lanes and counting them is funny math. Do the homework on system boards

It's not _that_ funny. Latency "taxes" are certainly a concern for some
workloads, but, ultimately, if there's not enough bandwidth to get the data to
the CPU, such that it might end up idle, that can trump any tax. The
difference between 40 and 128 lanes of PCIe 3.0 in transferring 64MiB is on
the order of 1ms.

Finding a mobo that allows access to all the lanes might be more challenging
when there are 128 than when there are 40-48, but I expect the popularity of
NVMe to reduce that challenge somewhat.

OTOH, it seems Epyc uses half those lanes for communication between CPUs, so
the usable lanes doesn't go up for 2S vs 1S, so perhaps the comparison is
really 128 lanes vs 96 lanes.

~~~
m_mueller
yes, latency vs. throughput, the main idea also behind GPU computing. It
worked there well, and CPUs are incredibly going to sacrifice latency for
throughout as well.

------
tanilama
What is wrong with Intel...Haven't seen this level of inaction from a major
firm for a while.

~~~
beerlord
Like what happens at any big monopoly... sales and marketing are prioritised
over product development.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614)

~~~
leadingthenet
I knew what it was before I clicked, but I still watched it to the end. He was
a really smart guy.

------
lolc
This reads like a hit-piece. What are the relative volumes of Xeon versu Epyc?
that would be kinda important to know. Maybe I just didn't see them mentioned
in the article.

------
trhway
back in 2002 it was a struggle for AMD to sign up any big one to offer servers
with Opteron chips. This time it looks different.

~~~
micv
Opteron servers were the absolute business for a few years in the mid/late
2000s. They were a preferred supplier for a few years while Intel wallowed.
2002 was before my time, but that was the era of SPARC in the business I work
in.

------
chx
The actual newsletter is on this page [https://h41360.www4.hpe.com/partner-
news/cat-enterprise.php](https://h41360.www4.hpe.com/partner-news/cat-
enterprise.php)

------
lmz
Very nice of them not to blur out the email recipient's address at the bottom
of the email :)

~~~
exikyut
No, I can't imagine that not being a major goof. SA may have just lost a
source, or at least some goodwill.

It's entirely possible this was deliberate but I call it unlikely.

------
aidenn0
Is it me, or did SA leave Aaron Weston's e-mail address in the image?

------
craftyguy
> The page is marked, “Confidential | HPE Internal & Authorized Partner Use
> Only” but it is quite open and does not require a login. (Note: We are not
> linking it because of all the sites that steal our stories, rip us off, and
> don’t credit)

Oh please.

~~~
TheForumTroll
I don't think you are aware how much background other writers grab from them
and no one credits them, ever. They have a reputation of knowing lots of
insider stuff and there's a reason that they can survive with a paywall while
hardly anyone else can (I can't think of a singe site writing about hardware
that is subscription based?).

~~~
nottorp
And what a paywall! I was reading semiaccurate for the entertainment factor
when it was free, now you can't even think of subscribing unless their info
actually means money to you.

------
faragon
Intel previous technology to 14nm is 22nm (2011 [1])

[1]
[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/process](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/process)

