
Ask HN: What are your predictions on the server CPU market for 2019? - jakobov
Will EPYC be able to compete with Xeon in TCO? Will Intel need to crash their prices to fight off AMD?<p>What will happen when AMD hits 10nm in its servers, is it game over for Intel?
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mhkool
Management of Intel is accustomed to have 60% profits and need a mind change
and a price drop. I foresee that AMD will get a lot of market share: 30-50%
and I use this wide range since besides price/performance there is also the
factor of security. Looking at Spectre et al. AMD has a safer product. Last
but not least, a single EPYC CPU is also an I/O monster: 128 PCI lanes for AMD
vs 40 PCI lanes for Intel.

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daveguy
And the former CEO of Intel said their goal was to keep AMD to 15-20% of the
server market. I agree. I think they will be able to capture more than 20%...
30-50% seems reasonable.

~~~
sitkack
> keep AMD to 15-20% of the server market

For the position that Intel is in (x86 cpu dominance) this is awkward thing to
say from a FTC point of view.

~~~
lostmsu
Its not like they require OEMs to bundle their Shopping Assistant with every
CPU installation.

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berbec
Yes, epyc will be competitive, but xeon will still dominate. Mild price drops,
or Intel "discovers" (coffee lake/8086k) extra cores/ghz under a mattress. A
lot of budget gets spent under the "nobody gets fired for buying xxxx"
principal. 10nm changes none of this, sadly. Amd has had better hardware
before.

~~~
daveguy
They've also had close to 50% of the market before.

And the "No one gets fired for buying xxxx" works more with software than with
hardware. x86 CPUs are essentially a commodity. The best price / performance +
performance density + energy efficiency will probably win. Previously Intel
had 2/3 (perf density and energy efficiency). With the new EPYC they will
probably have 0/3.

~~~
sitkack
Some shops will literally buy from the same vendor even if perf/$ is 3x higher
going another route. The IT director at place years ago would only go with the
most expensive HP stuff, we literally could have had 3x the compute and 4x the
storage for going super micro. Even if if his ridiculous MTBF numbers for SM
were true, we still would have had 1.5x compute and 3x storage after 3 years
for the same price.

So yes, if EPYC isn't offered on the right vendor platforms, they will be
shutout even if perf and density are better.

~~~
mmt
> Some shops will literally buy from the same vendor even if perf/$ is 3x
> higher going another route.

How many is "some", though? More specifically, what portion of the market do
they represent?

I'm actually genuinely curious as to whether anyone has a feel for this, as,
if the proportion is particularly high, it would explain why even AWS's prices
seem competitive to some managers who I would have otherwise thought would
have an idea of how cheap commodity hardware is.

Previously, I thought only "enterprise" shops suffered from this, where the
multiplier can easily be 10x for the most vendor-locked-in enterprisey
hardware like storage, network, and support (where the multiplier can be
infinity!) even if they pay no premium on the commodity compute.

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ipsum2
I'm excited about ARM chips from Qualcomm and Cavium, hoping to see open
source commits to projects to support the architecture.

~~~
bredren
I too, am interested in the acquired work of Cavium.

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nikanj
There will be a lot of headlines about Intel being doomed. And they will
continue to make money hand over fist, with very little loss of market share.

Contrast the times when everyone was certain Microsoft’s days of reign are
over. Linux was cheaper, OS C was better, and in the end, nothing really
changed.

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en4bz
Xeon is still better for complex workloads like databases since its inter-core
latency is lower. Epyc is better when there is no shared data between cores.
I'd say public cloud will pick up Epyc for such workloads. They may also use
Epyc as a 4x8 core VMs with VM affinity locked to each die. Xeon will continue
to be the standard for complex workloads.

~~~
mmt
> Xeon is still better for complex workloads like databases since its inter-
> core latency is lower.

Has that been demonstrated to be true, though, especially in light of Epyc's
much wider PCIe bandwidth?

For example, would a high-concurrency OLTP-type workload suffer as much from
increased inter-core latency as a single-query OLAP workload?

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CyberFonic
This question would benefit from answers that reflect what the large public
cloud providers, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft choose for their server
farms. I would hazard to guess that they would use AMD as a lever on Intel and
vice versa.

