People who have only been buying Intel CPU in the last decade won't jump ship immediately. Nobody gets fired for buying Intel CPUs, at least until very recently. You know you won't have compatibility issues etc...
Of course within the next few years Intel will have to react somehow, either by outperforming AMD significantly to justify the premium or by slashing prices.
Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.
The choice to avoid risk is easy.
This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered.
If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.
I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...
The AS/400 (IBM i) and ClearPath are my favourites.
One with its TIMI architecture and kernel level JIT, the other with an history going back to the 60's using an almost memory safe systems programming language, while people are still debating how to replace C.
Just curious, do they still support the Windows/Symbian style of dynamic libraries, with import libraries?
(The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)
Absolutely.
Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc;
The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run:
A) Windows
B) Full Disk Encryption
TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.
It is officially supported on TR and Epyc, as well as Pentiums, i3s, and Xeons (entry-level Xeons are nowhere near as expensive as people think they are).
If you think you need ECC my advice is to build out around a platform where you won't be the first person to try something and run into the bugs. There is not a large community of ECC-users on Ryzen.
But if your production environment goes tits-up then your savings go out the window and a whole lot more besides. And that's what you're risking by running a hardware configuration that is non-validated/unsupported.
People constantly make the mistake of assuming that businesses need to pinch pennies on their money-generating assets, just like they do on the rigs they use for entertainment at home. In the business world, reliability and official support trump an extra $1k in your pocket every time.
Forget Xeons entirely: there are still a lot of customers who buy Sun/Oracle/IBM hardware even though it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. $1k does not even register for a lot of businesses.
(ECC is validated on Epyc, of course - but the prices are a lot closer to Xeons there, it's no longer a slam-dunk. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis to determine which is actually a better deal for your workload. And frankly AMD has been doing an undue amount of massaging on their benchmarks here, like in their launch data where they just straight-up removed 43% from all the Intel benchmarks. )
http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus...
The Xeon has a slightly higher base clock, slightly lower turbo (all clocks are changed by 0.1 GHz), ECC, and a locked clock multiplier. It appears to benchmark consistently a couple of percent below the i7.
What's even the point of that product segmentation existing? To annoy their customers? I'd rather just buy a $300 processor that checks all the feature boxes instead of all but one.
http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_e3_1245_...
I believe this is called agglomeration[0][1], and may have parallels beyond physical, competing stores, into realms like similar, but differently named CPU's.
[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098017694131 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
edit: rplst8 mentions binning, and that seems like another likely factor as well.
Mobile chips are very small, under powered, and under clocked. They get fabbed first.
Then your core i3/i5/i7/E3's are all fabbed. As the process matures and can be expected to regularly handle 4GHz.
Next your E5/E7's get ran, normally in a few waves. Your _enthusiast_/workstation cores are generally fabbed with E5/E7 engineer samples which get sent out for testing. These have [1] 20+ cores so you need to know your process is stable so you don't have to sell >50% of them as 8-16core Xeons.
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But yeah the product segmentation is mostly to gate access. Only Xeons offer ECC [1].
And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
Ultimately this started to be a organization issue. Consumer sales (i3/i5/i7) doesn't even talk to enterprise sales (E5/E7). Consumer support can't answer questions about enterprise chips.
My personal opinion is the only reason Intel is still in business is they have a monopoly. Their anti-consumer practices are down right twisted.
[1] can/only are strong words there are a lot of exceptions/gotchas in Intel's product lines. Celerons/Pentiums sometimes have ECC, i3's and Pentiums have had unlocked Multiplers. There is a line of Xeons with unlocked multiplers. IDK
> And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
These statements are false, which you yourself acknowledge later in your post. You don't get credit for noting a caveat when the caveat is that your point is entirely false, at least in my book.
Intel no longer manufactures 2-core Xeons so Pentiums and i3s support ECC nowadays. This isn't uncommon, this has been the norm literally since they stopped making 2C Xeons (Haswell?).
And there are currently unlocked i3s in the lineup, just like there have been unlocked Pentiums in the past. It's the norm that Intel offers a barnburner overclockable SKU somewhere in the low end. They don't always, but they do it probably every other generation.
What's up with the i3-6320 supporting ECC but the i3-7320 no longer supporting it? Intel is at the least, very inconsistent with ECC on the consumer side.
Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?
Note that the ECC on the processor's internal data buses and caches is completely independent of whatever ECC the memory controller may or may not use.
Bingo.
Today, AMD's Eypc CPUs are a much closer match to their Xeon competitors than Opteron was. So if history is anything to go by, Intel has little to fear from AMD's latest efforts.
Given they've been slapped down for this, I wonder if they'll try it again. If they don't, AMD could have an easier go this time round.
They couldn't sell enough because someone was paying their customers not to buy their (superior) product.
1. Opteron in the early 2003 to 2004 did have a good run. It forced Intel to lower prices as well as using dirty tactics to compete. Let's not forget Opteron was AMD first entry into Server market. AMD then failed to execute after that.
2. Software compatibility was a thing, and may still be a thing judging by the comments here. But remember Datacentre is now largely dominated by Cloud and Web Host Providers, and most of them depends on Open Sources Software. All of a sudden, Google Amazon and Microsoft have incentives to improve software compatibility, if there is such problem exist.
3. IO compatibility / performance used be a problem for AMD. I am surprised it is not mentioned anywhere. Intel has the best IO ever with their Chipset. From PCI-E, SATA, AGP etc. But now none of these IO implementation are secrets anymore. Thanks to the SoC IP industry you can get the best and leverage the battle tested IP from other vendors. And not to mention the really only IO left is PCI-E. Which is very well defined.
I expect there will be lots of interest to test out EPYC, but the real volume will be Zen 2, when the industry has settled on EPYC being good enough. And I cant wait to see how Intel would react, after all if you look at their recent management teams changes it seems they dont have a clue what they are doing.