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Core 9000 series

IT Troll said:
Intel would never price that close to AMD. Current price is £100 too expensive and that is mostly to protect their HEDT range. Then on top of that we have the indefensible £100 price gouge from UK retailers.
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very good point on the HEDT stuff, intel have market segmentation and usually 8 core chips are not consumer parts.

I think it should be fairly obvious now effective competition doesnt mean prices will come down, this has been evident for the past few years with dram, flash nand, and smartphones. This is why I also said if AMD came out with a magic GPU nvidia prices would budge slightly but not much more.
 
Vince said:
I don't think this is correct at all, the business I have been working for roll out hp 745 g5 laptops which have ryzen in them and we are also transitioning our server estate to epyc. I am also hearing more and more industry guys looking towards epyc. Don't get me wrong there are still a number of people who are intel die hards but these days people don't actually care what is in the machine so far as it does what it says it should.
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Business desktops and laptops have a long replacement cycle and often tied to multi-year procurement contracts. Businesses are also risk averse and so will go with what they know. For example UK public sector procurement frameworks are predominately Intel.

I can see AMD making gains in the server space as the Epyc chips are impressive and offer good VFM which corporate accountants will like. They recently achieved a 1% market share (for the first time in 4 years) so it is a steep hill to climb. Lisa herself has a personal goal of reaching 5% by the end of the year.
 
IT Troll said:
Business desktops and laptops have a long replacement cycle and often tied to multi-year procurement contracts. Businesses are also risk averse and so will go with what they know. For example UK public sector procurement frameworks are predominately Intel.

I can see AMD making gains in the server space as the Epyc chips are impressive and offer good VFM which corporate accountants will like. They recently achieved a 1% market share (for the first time in 4 years) so it is a steep hill to climb. Lisa herself has a personal goal of reaching 5% by the end of the year.
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Funnily enough some of what you are saying is correct...

I work for a global manufacturing company with sites in every part of the world. My job role is client hardware, which includes procurement, distribution, upgrades, configs, rollouts etc etc.
We buy client hardware only from Dell, our server infrastructure again is all Dell, our network infrastructure is now all Cisco.

I spend a lot of time on the Dell Portal, and as yet I've not seen a Ryzen based laptop, desktop or HEDT Workstation. Our cycle on client hardware is 3 years, but the minute I see Dell add Ryzen to Latitudes and XPS systems I will swap our client machines across, I have had this discussion with other IT teams around the world and many are in agreement. The FC's want us to spend as little as possible so they will add pressure to make the swap if there is a decent cost saving towards opex.

My infrastructure colleague was at a Dell event today at Shepperton studio's, and it seems Dell was pushing Epyc hard, citing licensing savings due to the bigger core counts meaning less sockets overall etc.

Unfortunately as we are heavily VMware, and Intel based it would mean replacing everything at once as I believe Intel and AMD in the same VM environment do not play well together. And my boss doesn't want the hassle especially as we are a 24hr operation, just not an option right now.

But I was surprised to hear that Dell are really pushing Epyc at these events, which is nice to see, but I wish they would add more business client AMD options.

I bought a Xeon XPS workstation a couple of years ago for a CAD machine and the thing turned up with a 1080FE as the GPU lol... I questioned why there was no Firepro or Quaddro option at the time, just found it hilarious. That card has probably done all of 20hrs work in its lifetime lol.

But anyhow, there is definitely interest in AMD from a corporate business model, our central IT and the money men are all looking at it. Can imagine this is only going to increase as well.
 
SiDeards73 said:
But anyhow, there is definitely interest in AMD from a corporate business model, our central IT and the money men are all looking at it. Can imagine this is only going to increase as well.
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There is lots of buzz around lots of sectors that I/we deal with, be it commercial or industrial for the current crop of AMD server and workstation chips, and that fact that if you took our YoY figures for AMD systems shipped it would be up several thousand percent, but overall that is still a fraction of the number on Intel system shipped, something like 5%/95% but going in the right direction for AMD.

I think a lot of people who aren't in this sort of industry simply don't realise how long it takes to gain market share from a dominant incumbent, especially one that has the $'s and marketing to sway a lot of the procurement away from the competition making a hard job even harder.

Even if AMD only want to add 10%, to their current 20% share it will take some serious quantity of CPU's, you only need to do a revenue comparison (since CPU numbers are hard to come by) to see that in Q2 '18 Intel broke $17B and AMD was at $1.73B, even if you were generous and took $5B off Intel for non-CPU revenue streams that's still 7x more than AMD (that's leaving GPU's in too). AMD's growth rate has been amazing so far, showing a 50%+ YoY improvement from 2017, but if they only did 50% again in the next year, that's still only ~$2.6B, if they do 100% it's ~$3.5B, so realistically they need at least 2 more years of this kind of growth to be on par with Intel to some extent.
 
SiDeards73 said:
Funnily enough some of what you are saying is correct...

I work for a global manufacturing company with sites in every part of the world. My job role is client hardware, which includes procurement, distribution, upgrades, configs, rollouts etc etc.
We buy client hardware only from Dell, our server infrastructure again is all Dell, our network infrastructure is now all Cisco.

I spend a lot of time on the Dell Portal, and as yet I've not seen a Ryzen based laptop, desktop or HEDT Workstation. Our cycle on client hardware is 3 years, but the minute I see Dell add Ryzen to Latitudes and XPS systems I will swap our client machines across, I have had this discussion with other IT teams around the world and many are in agreement. The FC's want us to spend as little as possible so they will add pressure to make the swap if there is a decent cost saving towards opex.

My infrastructure colleague was at a Dell event today at Shepperton studio's, and it seems Dell was pushing Epyc hard, citing licensing savings due to the bigger core counts meaning less sockets overall etc.

Unfortunately as we are heavily VMware, and Intel based it would mean replacing everything at once as I believe Intel and AMD in the same VM environment do not play well together. And my boss doesn't want the hassle especially as we are a 24hr operation, just not an option right now.

But I was surprised to hear that Dell are really pushing Epyc at these events, which is nice to see, but I wish they would add more business client AMD options.

I bought a Xeon XPS workstation a couple of years ago for a CAD machine and the thing turned up with a 1080FE as the GPU lol... I questioned why there was no Firepro or Quaddro option at the time, just found it hilarious. That card has probably done all of 20hrs work in its lifetime lol.

But anyhow, there is definitely interest in AMD from a corporate business model, our central IT and the money men are all looking at it. Can imagine this is only going to increase as well.
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VMware wise you need the same hardware for drs and ha across the cluster, other than that you can add the amd hypervisors set up drs and ha etc across that cluster and then migrate the machines using vmotion so no downtime. Hardware Enhanced VMotion between Intel and AMD platforms has been part of VMware since build 3.5 and it works. It really shouldn't be difficult to migrate machines across without down time depending of course on your storage infrastructure and capacity for momentary loss of connection, like yourselves we run on 0 downtime. As yet i've not seen any issues in running clones of all of our 30 some odd VM servers successfully on a TR hypervisor and have even vmotioned between intel and ryzen. With the now mature TR and SP3 platforms I see no reason not to invest in epyc as my next infrastructure given its performance per socket and power draw I can already tell you the next upgrade to our servers and i think that will be a cluster of the next gen dl385's. Licensing wise a lot of companies including microsoft seem to be changing over to a per core based licensing model which im not all that impressed with tbh but it's good to see that vmware are holding ground with the per socket licensing so the density gained there can save a few quid.

Really contrary to what you're saying above with a big estate you could save a fortune in vmware licensing by migrating your infrastructure, rather than an unfortunately the fact that your infrastructure is hardware agnostic should be a massive plus.
 
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My understanding is that it is international. They just work from the serial and the RMA process normally requires shipping overseas anyway (which they organise). Have you experienced otherwise?
 
IT Troll said:
My understanding is that it is international. They just work from the serial and the RMA process normally requires shipping overseas anyway (which they organise). Have you experienced otherwise?
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This is my understanding of it also... The stocks all imported here anyway so makes no difference really.

Italiux said:
Pre ordered 9900k from rainforest US website for £489.50 including taxes and shipping ;) UK retailers can shove it theirs with £600 pricing. Ripoff Britain...:mad:
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Ditto ;)
 
Vince said:
VMware wise you need the same hardware for drs and ha across the cluster, other than that you can add the amd hypervisors set up drs and ha etc across that cluster and then migrate the machines using vmotion so no downtime. Hardware Enhanced VMotion between Intel and AMD platforms has been part of VMware since build 3.5 and it works. It really shouldn't be difficult to migrate machines across without down time depending of course on your storage infrastructure and capacity for momentary loss of connection, like yourselves we run on 0 downtime. As yet i've not seen any issues in running clones of all of our 30 some odd VM servers successfully on a TR hypervisor and have even vmotioned between intel and ryzen. With the now mature TR and SP3 platforms I see no reason not to invest in epyc as my next infrastructure given its performance per socket and power draw I can already tell you the next upgrade to our servers and i think that will be a cluster of the next gen dl385's. Licensing wise a lot of companies including microsoft seem to be changing over to a per core based licensing model which im not all that impressed with tbh but it's good to see that vmware are holding ground with the per socket licensing so the density gained there can save a few quid.

Really contrary to what you're saying above with a big estate you could save a fortune in vmware licensing by migrating your infrastructure, rather than an unfortunately the fact that your infrastructure is hardware agnostic should be a massive plus.
Click to expand...

I will be looking at AMD EPYC when next project crops up, the hassle we are going through patching Intel servers world wide for security flaws is a right PITA, having to have local staff standby while working remotely etc, having spares on site in case something fails, finding suitable downtime also means people working out of hours both in the UK and abroad, the software patching isn't too bad its the BIOS updates if they been made available, some kit is pretty old :(
 
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