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Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by javchz on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:26AM (#28526269)
Yeah, Custom ARM / RISC-V chips or even ASIC/FPGAs could start threatening x86/AMD64 for datacenters and "clouds" sooner than we think.
Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by dragontamer on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:23PM (#28527090)
ARM maybe. But I'm not convinced that the ARM-alliance (Fujitsu, Apple, Ampere, Neoverse) is quite as unified as you might think. Apple has no apparent goals for cloud/servers, Fujitsu seems entirely focused on the Japanese market, and Ampere Altra isn't reaching critical mass (Amazon prefers a Neoverse rather than joining forces with Ampere / using Altra).

As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/investments won't really be as aligned as Xeon and/or EPYC servers.

HiFive / RISC-V aren't anywhere close to the server-tier.

Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by einpoklum on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @02:40AM (#28535967)
> As long as the ARM-community is fragmented

Why does this matter? If popular OS distributions consistently target ARM-based CPUs, with a sufficient number of packages (esp. development-support-related) working on them, then who cares about fragmentation? An organization could buy systems with ARM chips and software will basically "just work".

Same argument for consumer PCs, although there you have the MS Windows issue I guess.

Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by dragontamer on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @12:26PM (#28541125)
Motherboard costs, motherboard designs, motherboard support.

The more fragmented your community, the harder it is for software to work consistently across all of them. Intel vs AMD has plenty of obscure issues (see "rr" project, and all the issues getting that debugging tool to work on AMD even though it has the same instruction set).

Sound, WiFi, Ethernet, southbridges, northbridges, PCIe roots. You know, standard compatibility issues that having a ton of SKUs just naturally makes more difficult. Having a "line" of southbridges / consistent motherboards does wonders for compatibility (fix the BIOS/UEFI bug in one motherboard, fix it for all) in Intel/AMD world.

But just as AMD has AMD-specific motherboard bugs, and Intel has Intel-specific motherboard bugs... I'd expect Graviton to have its share of bugs that are inconsistent with Apple M1 or Ampere Altra.

Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by skohan on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @04:12PM (#28530416)
What about graviton? Isn't it already competitive with x86 on price/performance?
Re:Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem ... by dragontamer on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @04:26PM (#28530594)
Amazon doesn't offer graviton in the open market. You can only get those chips if you buy AWS.

Graviton is a standard N1 neoverse core, which is slightly slower than a Skylake Xeon / Zen2 EPYC. There's hope that N2 will be faster, but even if it is, we don't really have an apples-to-apples comparison available (since Amazon doesn't sell that chip).

The most likely source of Neoverse cores is the Ampere Altra, which is expected to have N2 cores shipping eventually. As usual though: since Ampere has lower shipping volume than other companies, the motherboards are very expensive.

x86 (both Intel and AMD) have extremely high volumes: so from a TCO perspective, its hard to beat them, especially when you consider motherboard prices into the mix.