Thread Ripper 2, and the effect on Intel pricing

[Madpete]

So with AMD's Thread Ripper 2 upon us, offering reasonable IPC performance and a bonkers amount of cores at a very reasonable asking price I've been wondering what Intel will do... if anything.

It looks like they don't have a desktop product to complete on core count, so I'm presuming they will be forced to cut the prices on their next HEDT CPU's to stay competitive? Unless they have something in reserve, which doesn't seem likely.

I think it's great what AMD is doing and if I was buying a new rig I'd probably go that way, but as someone who already has an X299 system (and has spent out on it) I'm wondering how it will affect the platform with Intel's up coming refresh, with one eye on an upgrade.

I don't need a billion cores, but I competitively priced 16 core to AMD's 2950x would be very tempting as I use my PC for a bit of everything.

The only thing with Intel is they have had it their way so long, they might just flatly refuse to adapt their strategy and carry on (they've done this before), though I can't see that making any kind of business sense and would be bad for market share.

So what do you guys think will happen?

If you see any news, maybe you could post it here?

One thing is sure, this revitalised AMD is good news for consumers in both camps.

 

[AndreiD]

They're bringing their XCC dies to HEDT. It's just going to be their Xeon parts but probably better bins, ECC cut and 4 memory channels instead of 6. Those go up to 28 cores and they can be competitive with the 32 core Threadrippers since it's monolithic die vs 4x dies with NUMA (and only 2 dies have direct memory access).
They already demo-ed an upcoming HEDT 28 Core SKU doing 5Ghz with a chiller at Computex. Going to be interesting to see how much that thing can be overclocked on less exotic cooling and what stock clocks it'll have (<3Ghz base and ~4Ghz boost stock most likely).

 

[Deleted member 66701]

They're bringing their XCC dies to HEDT. It's just going to be their Xeon parts but probably better bins, ECC cut and 4 memory channels instead of 6. Those go up to 28 cores and they can be competitive with the 32 core Threadrippers since it's monolithic die vs 4x dies with NUMA (and only 2 dies have direct memory access).
They already demo-ed an upcoming HEDT 28 Core SKU doing 5Ghz with a chiller at Computex. Going to be interesting to see how much that thing can be overclocked on less exotic cooling and what stock clocks it'll have (<3Ghz base and ~4Ghz boost stock most likely).

What's going to be interesting is how much they charge for a 28 core HEDT chip seeing as the one they demoed was a £10k chip.

 

[Madpete]

What's going to be interesting is how much they charge for a 28 core HEDT chip seeing as the one they demoed was a £10k chip.

Exactly this, the days of Intel getting away with that kind of insane pricing are gone I think.. Or at least while AMD is able to remain competitive.

AMD have priced their 32 core cpu at £1700, if Intel don't respond to this AMD will surely batter their market share.

 

[AndreiD]

What's going to be interesting is how much they charge for a 28 core HEDT chip seeing as the one they demoed was a £10k chip.

The Xeon 8180/8176 Platinum? Those are "recommended" customer prices, don't think many companies pay anything close to that. They can price it <£2k and still have good margins on them, their 14nm is very mature at this point and despite those dies being fairly huge (694 mm²) their yields are probably pretty good.
They'll release an i9 8990XE 28C with 165W~240W TDP, 2.4~3.0Ghz base clock, 4.0~4.4Ghz turbo priced at around the £2000~3000 mark, so a hefty premium over the 2990WX.

@Madpete HEDT is a niche market, they ship a lot more volume in regular consumer parts and OEM SKUs, like the 15W TDP U CPUs used in laptops.
HEDT & halo products are more about image rather than anything and AMD is doing a very good job of washing away their Bulldozer era image. Also, to be fair, the only reason Intel could get away with their inflated pricing was AMD not being able to be competitive since Bulldozer & its derivatives were duds.

 

[Panos]

They're bringing their XCC dies to HEDT. It's just going to be their Xeon parts but probably better bins, ECC cut and 4 memory channels instead of 6. Those go up to 28 cores and they can be competitive with the 32 core Threadrippers since it's monolithic die vs 4x dies with NUMA (and only 2 dies have direct memory access).
They already demo-ed an upcoming HEDT 28 Core SKU doing 5Ghz with a chiller at Computex. Going to be interesting to see how much that thing can be overclocked on less exotic cooling and what stock clocks it'll have (<3Ghz base and ~4Ghz boost stock most likely).

Actually they presented a Xeon SkylakeX overclocked to 5Ghz with a chiller.
And given Intel is still stuck at 14nm with SkylakeX, it will run hot, consuming ridiculous amount of power.

So performance wise a 28core with boost 4Ghz SkylakeX might be in part with the 24 core 2970WX with boost at 4.3. But it wont come close to the 2990WX.

 

[Panos]

The Xeon 8180/8176 Platinum? Those are "recommended" customer prices, don't think many companies pay anything close to that. They can price it <£2k and still have good margins on them, their 14nm is very mature at this point and despite those dies being fairly huge (694 mm²) their yields are probably pretty good.
They'll release an i9 8990XE 28C with 165W~240W TDP, 2.4~3.0Ghz base clock, 4.0~4.4Ghz turbo priced at around the £2000~3000 mark, so a hefty premium over the 2990WX.

As chip core count goes up, so does the size, cost and failure rate, regardless how mature the process is.
If Intel was able to make 32core 14nm monolithic chip, they could have done it last year trying to hold off losing market share in the server market.

In HEDT market, that behemoth wont be able to clock high, 4Ghz will be stretching requiring liquid cooling.

Already the existing SkylakeX 18 core for 4.4Ghz needs an exuberant 800W+.
Adding an extra 55% higher core count, doubt there is a single X299 board that could power it above 4Ghz.
Even the board intel presented at the event was custom made. Look how many CPU VRMS needed to push to 5Ghz. .

Also if you take the image of the 7980XE bellow and add 55% more die size, it completely fills the inner package. (that is der8auer with the delided 7980XE).

 

[AndreiD]

Neither of those two CPUs will do all core boost at their max turbo, so it's better to compare base frequencies since that's what both of those will sit at in multithreaded workloads. Though one caveat is that for Intel they rate it for AVX workloads so the base clock can be slightly higher depending on workload, for example the 7980XE has a stock all core rating of 2.6Ghz, but in non AVX workloads the all core clock will be closer to that of a 1950X (3.4Ghz all core for both).
I'm not sure how AMD will handle turbo for the 2nd gen Threadrippers, I think they'll on average be 100~200Mhz ahead of Skylake-X counterparts clock wise, but then again there's still a decent IPC difference between Skylake-X and Pinnacle Ridge (~8% according to The Stilt), and NUMA will add to it in some workloads.
Intel was already ahead per core wise with Skylake-X vs 1st gen Threadrippers, at most 2nd gen 12 and 16 core Threadrippers will match Skylake-X SKUs with the same number of cores (which I think is excellent given the price points AMD is positioning them at) and the 24 and 32 core parts won't really get there because of the issue that only 2 of the dies have direct memory access, the other 2 dies have to hop through the IF, which is really not ideal. So depending on how Intel turbos the 28C part, it's probably going to be slightly faster or on par with the 32C 2990WX, but will most likely also cost more, so it's going to be down to checking reviews.

I'm curious if they'll solder these, they're 694 mm² dies, so they have to...? If not it's going to be more Skylake-X memes

As chip core count goes up, so does the size, cost and failure rate, regardless how mature the process is.
If Intel was able to make 32core 14nm monolithic chip, they could have done it last year trying to hold off losing market share in the server market.

In HEDT market, that behemoth wont be able to clock high, 4Ghz will be stretching requiring liquid cooling.

Already the existing SkylakeX 18 core for 4.4Ghz needs an exuberant 800W+.
Adding an extra 55% higher core count, doubt there is a single X299 board that could power it above 4Ghz.
Even the board intel presented at the event was custom made. Look how many CPU VRMS needed to push to 5Ghz. .

Also if you take the image of the 7980XE bellow and add 55% more die size, it completely fills the inner package. (that is der8auer with the delided 7980XE).

Well of course their yields aren't going to be as good on their bigger dies as they are on their smaller dies, but I highly doubt they're as bad as most people think. The volume at which they sell the Platinums to hyperscalers would result in their margins slipping if they had yield issues (and hyperscalers definitely do not pay anything close to the list price), but they currently sit at almost 2x AMD's margins. I wouldn't cry Intel a river even if their yields are bad.

Their 28 core XCC die is already huge enough, I presume the 694 mm² die is the biggest they projected they could make on a mature 14nm process with good enough yields. We'll probably see higher core counts on 10nm+.
We're not talking all core clock, the 1st gen X399 motherboards can barely handle a stock 32 core Threadripper (according to buildzoid who does motherboard VRM analysis on youtube) and the X299 motherboards aren't going to be much different with the supposed 28 core Skylake-X, anything over 4Ghz is going to realistically be turbo limited to a few cores. That 4.4Ghz on the 2950X is most likely on 2 cores, given how the 2700X's turbo acts.

If you bump the voltage and do AVX stress testing then you'll get a lot of heat out of Skylake-X, did you even see the AVX throughput those chips have? One Skylake-X core has 2x 512 bit FMAs (1x 512 bit one and 2x 256 bit fused) and one Zen core has 2x 128 bit ones fused together. As a side note, that's one of the reasons why AMD isn't making inroads in HPC with Epyc.
But I agree that X299 boards won't be able to cope with overclocking the XCC die Skylake-X CPUs. And sorry to be pedantic, but the XCC die is only 43% bigger than the HCC one (485 mm² vs 694 mm²).

Imo the best SKU of either of these lineups seems to be the 2950X, 4.4Ghz (maybe +50Mhz with XFR?) on 2 cores (1 per die?), can probably be overclocked to ~4.3Ghz all core on current X399 motherboards and is priced excellently. The higher core count variants are just halo products and only interesting if you have workloads that can actually use all of those cores, otherwise they come with too many limitations.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Intel need to sort out the exploits as well as the price/performance.

 

[ilc72]

They're bringing their XCC dies to HEDT. It's just going to be their Xeon parts but probably better bins, ECC cut and 4 memory channels instead of 6. Those go up to 28 cores and they can be competitive with the 32 core Threadrippers since it's monolithic die vs 4x dies with NUMA (and only 2 dies have direct memory access).
They already demo-ed an upcoming HEDT 28 Core SKU doing 5Ghz with a chiller at Computex. Going to be interesting to see how much that thing can be overclocked on less exotic cooling and what stock clocks it'll have (<3Ghz base and ~4Ghz boost stock most likely).

You need to do your research, it is unlikely that the 28-Core HEDT part from Computex based on an entirely different architecture, as referred to in another post $10,000 Xeon part, than the the X299 Skylake-X line up. The whole way the demo was done and the subsequent furore about the cooling used, showed that it was done to steal the headlines from the Threadripper 2 launch. There is a Skylake-X refresh in the roadmap for late 2018 but I will wager that the 28-core won’t be a part of the lineup.

 

[AndreiD]

You need to do your research, it is unlikely that the 28-Core HEDT part from Computex based on an entirely different architecture, as referred to in another post $10,000 Xeon part, than the the X299 Skylake-X line up. The whole way the demo was done and the subsequent furore about the cooling used, showed that it was done to steal the headlines from the Threadripper 2 launch. There is a Skylake-X refresh in the roadmap for late 2018 but I will wager that the 28-core won’t be a part of the lineup.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but where did I even say it was a different architecture? It was most like a Skylake-SP XCC die or some early Cascade Lake XCC sample (unlikely). And of course it was done to take some wind out of AMD's sails, it was just smoke and mirrors.

They already announced that Cascade Lake-X is coming by the end of the year and supposedly the early Xeon variants are already shipping to hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, et al.
I think they will sell their XCC die, they need to have a halo product out in the HEDT market even if it's low volume.

 

[humbug]

Actually they presented a Xeon SkylakeX overclocked to 5Ghz with a chiller.
And given Intel is still stuck at 14nm with SkylakeX, it will run hot, consuming ridiculous amount of power.

So performance wise a 28core with boost 4Ghz SkylakeX might be in part with the 24 core 2970WX with boost at 4.3. But it wont come close to the 2990WX.

This, that chip was probably pulling around 800 Watts of power and needed an industrial level water chiller to keep it cool for a 5 second Cinebench run, by the time something like that is viable on desktop AMD will have already have done it first and moved to the next level.

AMD is already replacing what was the 32 core EPYC server CPU with a 64 core, hence the reason for the 32 core coming to HEDT.

In the sort term Intel cannot compete with that, by short term i mean 2022 as AMD are likley going to be approaching 100 cores by then, Intel will lose, are losing market share, AMD are gaining it and with it making real money again, which is important as it means AMD have R&D to remain challenging to Intel.

 

[Madpete]

@AndreiD I agree and you are right, HEDT isn't high volume so maybe they aren't so worried.

On the other hand though, being outdone (on paper) by AMD never sits well with Intel. It makes them look back, and like a high performance car company it's the flagship that sells the range.

Also I think that AMD's business model is across the range, so for example even though the 8700k is arguably a better gaming CPU than the 2700x, Intel has felt the need to respond with the upcoming 8 core 9000 series... this is an area where they are able to respond and probably outgun AMD (maintain pricing). But again, they are being pushed.

Going forward, I keep reading that Intel's 10nm process is delayed again (end 2019 was the last time frame I read), while I hear AMD's 7nm (via TSMC is on track). I've read that TMSC's 7nm and Intel's 10nm are pretty much the same thing (no advantage to one over the over), but whats important is if AMD get there first at volume, if so then again this is another big advantage.

I just can't see Intel having a particularly good time over the next 18-36 months, esp if they don't get their 10nm back on track and sort out EUVL at volume.

If I translate this in my head to end product I just think Intel will either have to "put up, or shut up"... Ie release a product with clearly superior performance and maintain their pricing structure, or recognise that if the playing field is fairly level (give or take 5%), people aren't going to pay 2x the price over a competitor.

At least, I hope this is what will happen.

Hugely interested to see how this all plays out!!

 

[humbug]

The competitive situation currently looks like this.....

German Retail conglomerate, CPU sales for the past year, pretty even right now 50% Intel 50% AMD.



The well known US Rainforest site.... Intel No: #1 with 8700K but AMD #2, #3, #4 and #5

Click on Spoilers.

Spoiler

Highest selling HEDT goes to AMD.

Spoiler

AMD's new 32 core is also outselling all Intel's HEDT Chips, Intel's first HEDT ranks #34, the 2990WX #26

Spoiler

This is really impressive stuff, a lot of win for AMD right now....

 

[Ayahuasca]

I'd expect AMD to maybe go 60/40 in this next year to be honest, Intel would need some pretty drastic price drops to stop those ever increasing AMD sales.

 

[Panos]

This, that chip was probably pulling around 800 Watts of power and needed an industrial level water chiller to keep it cool for a 5 second Cinebench run, by the time something like that is viable on desktop AMD will have already have done it first and moved to the next level.

AMD is already replacing what was the 32 core EPYC server CPU with a 64 core, hence the reason for the 32 core coming to HEDT.

In the sort term Intel cannot compete with that, by short term i mean 2022 as AMD are likley going to be approaching 100 cores by then, Intel will lose, are losing market share, AMD are gaining it and with it making real money again, which is important as it means AMD have R&D to remain challenging to Intel.

7980XE needs 800W for 4.4 clock. A 28 core CPU at 5Ghz would need more than 1200W.

 

[Panos]

@humbug thats from two days ago, when the 1920X was on sell off

And that is the USA one.

Spoiler

 

[humbug]

@humbug thats from two days ago, when the 1920X was on sell off

And that is the USA one.

Spoiler

Wow.... ok that's impressive :O

 

[Freddie1980]

As chip core count goes up, so does the size, cost and failure rate, regardless how mature the process is.
If Intel was able to make 32core 14nm monolithic chip, they could have done it last year trying to hold off losing market share in the server market.

In HEDT market, that behemoth wont be able to clock high, 4Ghz will be stretching requiring liquid cooling.

Already the existing SkylakeX 18 core for 4.4Ghz needs an exuberant 800W+.
Adding an extra 55% higher core count, doubt there is a single X299 board that could power it above 4Ghz.
Even the board intel presented at the event was custom made. Look how many CPU VRMS needed to push to 5Ghz. .

Spoiler

Also if you take the image of the 7980XE bellow and add 55% more die size, it completely fills the inner package. (that is der8auer with the delided 7980XE).

I counted 29 VRM's for the CPU alone! Compare that to the top of the line ROG Rampage VI Extreme which is used by overclockers to set world records "only" has a 8 phase design the ROG board looks like a kids toy in comparison.

 

[BTVA]

I am happy for AMD and how well they are doing Wish I could use them one day