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  • jabber - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Will look forward to picking one up on Ebay for £50 in a few years.
  • bill.rookard - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Haha. Indeed. I don't think it will ever really hit $50.00 but if it falls to $250.00 it would be worth it to pick up.

    My question is pretty simple though. What about the Ryzen based server parts which you know will be hitting soon. The 32 core Naples chip - assuming that the Zen cores are indeed solid - and assuming that the pricing is similarly aggressive in their pricing - is likewise going to shake up the server market. I'd love to see how long that pricing at almost $9,000 per cpu will hold.
  • Black Obsidian - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    AMD's penetration in the server market has historically been almost entirely on the low end, despite having had some mid-range and even a couple of high-end (4S) offerings.

    It'll be interesting to see if Ryzen changes that, but I wouldn't hold my breath. For the 4S workloads I'm familiar with, a $9K CPU--or even the $100K box as whole, once you factor in 4 such CPUs and a couple TB of RAM--is a rounding error on the licensing costs of the software running on it and the professional(s) hired to use it.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    So what *are* the workloads for a 4S or a 8S server running these chips (and packing up to, what, 24 TB of RAM)? Running thousands of VMs in one box?
  • keeepcool - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    High Frequency Trading bots, google search, and lots more banking stuff, paired with buckets of FPGA's.
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    High frequency trading prefers low latency above anything else. Those systems often use lower core counts at higher clocks to shave off a bit of time. This chip doesn't fit well into that role vs. other models from Intel.
  • nils_ - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Also, you don't really want NUMA in HFT, so there is little point in getting that many sockets.
  • Brutalizer - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    There are many types of high frequency traders. Scalpers needs ultra low latency, and they prefer a few highly clocked cores. Say an algorithm needs 20 steps before you can decide to trade or not, if you have 4GHz you finish 20 steps before another cpu that uses 2GHz. So HFT are not interested in these E7 cpus, they are too low clocked.

    The use case for these E7 cpus with up to 8-sockets, are large business servers such as SAP, databases, etc - such ERP business software must run on a single large machine, and can not be run on clusters such as SGI UV3000 servers. The largest scale-up business servers typically have 16 or 32-sockets. The largest scale-up clusters, typically have 10.000s of cores and 100s of TB of RAM - in effect a mini super computing cluster. The largest scale-up business server that SGI has, is a UV300H with 24-sockets, or have SGI released a new model with 32-sockets now? Anyway, business servers stop at 32-sockets. Scale out HPC clusters go to 10.000s of cores and above. But they can not run business software (because such software communicate too much between the cpus, so it can not spread out on a slow cluster)

    I have checked the "world records" that Intel claim. And they are somewhat strange. For instance, Intel claims 4-socket server world record of 43.300 saps. Well, one 2-socket SPARC M7 server reaches 30.800 saps. https://blogs.oracle.com/partnertech/entry/new_sap...
    And if you go to 8-sockets, SPARC M7 reaches 130.000 saps: https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20160531_s...

    So, Intel is able to claim the "4-socket sap world record" only because Oracle has not bothered to benchmark 4-socket SPARC M7 servers.

    Likewise with the next benchmark I bothered to check, Java specjbb2015. 16-socket Integrity HP Superdome, reaches: 776,269 max-jOPS and 84,557 critical-jOPS. The number of interest is usually the critical-jOPS. But anyway, let us compare both numbers to one single SPARC M7 cpu: 120,603 max-jOPS and 60,280 critical-jOPS.
    https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/201511_spe...
    In other words, the 16-socket Intel E7 cpu server might have the 16-socket world record, but if Oracle just bothers to benchmark a 8-socket SPARC M7 server, then Oracle will easily get the world record.

    I think the other "world records" are similar. Because, typically, SPARC M7 is 2-3x faster than the fastest Intel Xeon or POWER8. And if this E7 want to compete with SPARC M7, it must be 2-3x faster than the E5-2699v4 cpu. Which can not happen. So I would be very surprised if Intel manages to snatch one single world record from SPARC M7 on a socket-per-socket basis. We all know that Intels new cpus are not 200-300% faster than the previous generation, no, they are only 10% faster or so. To compete with SPARC, Intel needs 200-300% improvements.
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    One of these days I'll work out just what the hell SAP is...
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    SAP is the goop that comes out of a tree or plant after you damage it somehow. Some people process certain types of SAP to make delicious syrup for pancakes and the like.
  • joema - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    "...typically, SPARC M7 is 2-3x faster than the fastest Intel Xeon or POWER8...I would be very surprised if Intel manages to snatch one single world record from SPARC M7 on a socket-per-socket basis"

    If the M7 is 2-3x faster than the fastest Xeon, why is it unable to produce TPC-E transaction processing performance that supports that claim? I don't see any SPARC machine in the top 10: http://www.tpc.org/tpce/results/tpce_perf_results.... even including the most recent results: http://www.tpc.org/tpce/results/tpce_last_ten_resu...
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Running VMs in a single box is indeed one of the major applications.

    Backend database workloads are another due to their massive memory capacity. Though high socket count is preferred for the memory capacity, often high core count isn't necessarily favored due to the per core licensing model of most enterprise database products.
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    AMD actually had some good 4S traction and even some 8S systems back in the early days of the Opteron. Scaling via Hypertransport proved to be more efficient than the FSB topology used by Intel.
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    AMD had a lot of HPC wins back in the Opteron day. I wonder if that was also because of Hypertransport? I guess Intel's Quick Path ticks that box nowadays.
  • Krysto - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link

    Eh, sure if you're talking about using 2 such CPUs or whatever. But think of all of major companies that do machine learning or offer cloud services. Those extra few thousand dollars per chip will add-up quickly.
  • Ej24 - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    I'm definitely waiting to hear more about Naples as well. So much hype around ryzen desktop which is great, but has anyone heard anything on Naples in a while?
  • Freakie - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Not likely to ever happen. The highest end server CPU's tend to not hit crazy low price points because there just isn't enough volume. Not enough people will buy this CPU new for there to be enough to be dirt cheap in the used market in the future. The demand for used versions of this CPU will outstrip the supply.
  • Anato - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    They will go down to 0 at some point. When I was a teen in 90's there was old $100k servers as table or bench in lounge of local ham society.

    But bigger "problem" with these systems is, they don't come to second hand sale as companies worry about the data they may still contain so they are crushed to dust and not sold out.
  • HighTech4US - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Quote: They will go down to 0 at some point.

    At which point they actually have a value of zero because NO ONE wants them.

    While they have value they will still have a price much higher than $50.

    Example: Xeon W3690 (top of the line 2010 Westmere single socket workstation CPU) came to market in 2010 at $999. It still sells for $140 on eBay.
  • prisonerX - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Price and value are two different things, genius.

    The computer club at my alma matter were overjoyed when they received their free PDP-11, previously worth 6 figures.

    Sure they had to punch opcodes into the front panel to get it to boot, but that's part of the fun, isn't it?
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    To be fair, I thought we were discussing price.
  • jabber - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    To be fair what I was really referring to is that Xeon chips do tend to plummet in value on Ebay after around 5 years. I've picked up top of the range 2008 Xeons for double figures just a couple of years a go. Ran a nice dual X5470 ($1500 new) setup and got both chips together in 2013 for £80! Still WPrimed in around 6.5 seconds! Most folks ignore Xeons.
  • smithereen - Monday, February 20, 2017 - link

    Westmeres drop into x58 motherboards though.
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Most of the companies I know have no issue reselling the raw system: they just remove the boot drives.

    Even then that would be minimal since storage on these beasts is often supplemented by a SAN.
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Amusingly enough, I just saw an ebay listing for a 16 core Opteron at $25 USD. Server chips don't hold their value for long and I wouldn't be surprised to see any Xeon turn up on ebay after 4-5 years for minimal cost.
  • HighTech4US - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Top of the line ones DO HOLD value. Obsolete slow old ones not so much.
  • Byte - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Any drop in high end chip holds lots of value. Just look at old i7s on ebay.
  • jabber - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    The difference is the ease of putting them into systems. An i7 will have a huge choice of old motherboards so helps keep the value. Trying to build a Xeon system is a different beast entirely. The lack of system options reduces their value to tinkerers. Thats why I buy old Dell workstations to put them into. Less messing about.
  • jabber - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Not to mention you may have to use ECC ram.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    i7's are consumer processors, not server CPUs. There's a much smaller market for used server processors than there are for second hand consumer chips. Businesses and enterprise customers usually have vendor support or are purchasing new hardware with a warranty rather than spelunking ebay for a replacement CPU in a dead, mission-critical server.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    ^ This.
  • Danvelopment - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Even if it doesn't hold value, the people buying these particular chips are not the kind of people who will be looking to recover $100 in five years from them. And especially not in a single chip config.

    At best they'll send them to a recycling company (who will mark them up significantly) or an engineer will swipe them as the server is decommissioned and give them to his friends or use them himself.

    E3 and E5 generational equivs will be dime a dozen, but not E7s.
  • scook9 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    You must realize that a) this isn't a LGA2011 socket and will not drop into a single easily available motherboard on the market b) when these do (if ever) become available on ebay, regardless of CPU cost the motherboard will probably still be $600-800 at least - not including ram, a power supply with 8x EPS connectors, or the rest of the server. These will never be in consumer set-ups except for very fringe cases (engineers that took home decommissioned gear). That has been the case with the Itanium processors of the past, and all past E7 generations. It is simply in another league that is beyond what consumers deal with. And by the way, if you did ever manage to get all of the above for less than the price of a car, you will still have to pay a small fortune to power it all relative to what a normal home uses.
  • nils_ - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    According to Intel (but what do they know) it's a LGA2011, may be some BIOS issues on most boards though.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    It should drop in fine, in my opinion.

    FCLGA is just a more full name of socket, means Flip-Chip LandGridArray. So all of Intel LGAs are FCLGAs.

    Here is my m/b taking all sorts of Xeons:

    http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-ASRock/X99_WS-E_10G....

    And about the cost - yes, I've spent THOUSANDS on my machine.
  • fanofanand - Monday, February 20, 2017 - link

    That list doesn't include any E7's, which supports the point he was making.
  • r3loaded - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    They missed a trick, should've priced it at $8894!
  • FatalError - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    I guess it is 8894 + (v)4
  • Ariknowsbest - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    How will it stack up against 127 G4560 cluster that could be a interesting story.
  • RaichuPls - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Lmao, world domination.
  • ddriver - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    What they mean by that is that even though the product is laughably overpriced, and thus representing a poor purchase with a low value, it is OK when you are in one of those positions where you get to exploit humanity, because in the end it won't be you paying the unreasonable cost, but your slaves.
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    I wasn't aware that Anandtech renamed Comments to Soapbox recently.
  • fanofanand - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    The Social Justice Warrior does not ask for, or wait for permission, the world is their soapbox.
  • ddriver - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    You mistake "commenting" with "conforming".
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    My mistake. I'll register your comments as "deformed" from this point forward.
  • ddriver - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Whatever helps you sleep at night.
  • dstarr3 - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    These aren't consumer-grade CPUs. These aren't meant to be purchased by consumers, they're meant to be purchased by companies. And every tech company ever has saved their best price-gouging for the enterprise.
  • lmcd - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    It's not even gouging when you consider the lower number of people a similar number of engineering hours are spread over. This is a really basic economics question.
  • StrangerGuy - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    $9K per chip sounds expensive until you see somebody like MS charges their SQL enterprise server at $7K per core.

    But-but-but evil Intel/Ngreedia and the overpriced server hardware because the customers buying those hardware are obviously using them only for dat sweet 720 deg no-scope CoD killstreaks.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Ha ha, very true.
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Over priced yes but still a minor part of the cost compared to the licensing scheme *cough* Oracle *cough* charge for the software running on these chips. Intel knows that there are customers buying that software so they have an idea of just how much price gauging they can get away with.
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    It's kinda amazing that anyone still uses Oracle and hasn't switched to open source, given the economics.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    I enjoyed that too.
  • jimjamjamie - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    > increase base clock by 200 mhz

    > increase price by $1724

    Please make this nightmare end
  • cekim - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    The funny thing about computes is that electricity often swamps the cost equation. So, you missed a dimension in your equation - power/heat drop by X. I'm certainly underwhelmed by the performance increase in Intel's parts over the last 3-4 generations, but power/heat have improved substantially when you consider the high-core-count chips especially. So, the nightmare for consumers will continue until or unless AMD manages to step up and stay up as a competitor.
  • martinw - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    Increasing clock by 10% means you (roughly) need 10% fewer servers for the same level of overall performance. So they can hike the price by more than 10%, as long as the overall cost of the new servers is slightly cheaper than the larger number of cheaper servers with the slower CPU. They are competing against the non-CPU components in those extra servers.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    I'm interested to know how this is a 'nightmare' for you.

    Are you in dire need of, or being forced to buy these chips?

    Somehow, I expect not.
  • fanofanand - Monday, February 20, 2017 - link

    I think the comment was loosely identifying a common Intel practice as of late, which is to provide very minor incremental increases in performance. The irony here is that if anything it has saved him money because he didn't "need" to replace his existing hardware with new. That's the piece of this puzzle so frequently forgotten, is that the slow rate of progress (or at least seemingly slow rate) has benefited consumers massively, with the exception of the e-peen crowd who NEEDS the latest and greatest to run DOTA games.
  • Wolfpup - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    165 watts is pretty amazing. A single 3.4GHz Penryn 13 years ago drew I want to say 135 watts :-D

    Naturally every time I see a story like this, I want one of these to throw Folding@Home on.
  • ajp_anton - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link

    It's not THAT amazing, considering what else already is available.
    165W for 24 cores is about the same as 14W for two cores. Where have we seen that before? Oh yes, 15W for the laptop U-series. And those include an iGPU, and probably a bigger uncore relative to the core count.
    The i7-5600U (Broadwell) goes from 2.6 to 3.2 GHz, about the same as this one. About 10 times higher TDP budget allows this to turbo a bit higher on a single core.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Which is why I think the Zen core is so promising. If Zen has out-Cored Core, i.e. they've constructed a relatively simple, relatively fast, and efficient core, it shouldn't be hard for them to start knocking out a wide range of parts. That would really challenge Intel.
  • FalcomPSX - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    4 core 8 thread, 3.5ghz turbo xeon for nearly $7,000?? Who in their right mind would order this overpriced turd of a chip? Yes the high core count chips demand a high price premium, and they have the specs/performance to back it up, but what possible purpose would a $7,000 server cpu that a pedestrian $300 i7 would wipe the floor with in every single possible way serve? I mean yes, i get that the xeon's are capable of SMP configurations and you could have an 8 socket system with 8 of these chips in it, but if you need a system with as much horsepower as an 8-way system(or even a 4-way) could provide, you wouldn't be settling for 4 core chips, their own 24-core chip is only ~$300 more, TDP is only 25w higher, and runs 100mhz slower at max turbo, granted probably much closer to base with all cores loaded, but if you're able to load all the cores on a system with 4 or 8 sockets, it would absolutely demolish a 4-way setup with 4 quad core chips. The only purpose this 4-core chip serves is to drain tons of money out of companies with more money than brains.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    Why the anger? You never know, there might just be a workload out there for which this chip delivers the best return on investment. In the meantime, it's not harming anyone.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    +1
  • keeepcool - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    ECC memory, your fancy i7 wont know how to use it, and that WHY Intel can and does charge those prices.
  • fanofanand - Monday, February 20, 2017 - link


    AMD has long supported ECC with their consumer chips, what Intel is doing there is market segmentation. The only reason they have been able to get away with it is because of AMD's inability to provide competition. Assuming Ryzen supports ECC (which all signs point to it doing) then what will be the excuse then? Intel charges a LOT more for VERY similar silicon because of the validation that goes into it, but is that validation worth a 30x premium?
  • StrangerGuy - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    After software licenses, power/HVAC costs, server space limitations, maintenance, rent, wages etc $8000 per chip is trivial to multibillion companies.

    But hey, what do those professional enterprise guys know anyway, they obviously suck at their jobs compared to know-it-alls like you.
  • nils_ - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    I've seen that sort of thing, but the reasons more often than not don't have a lot to do with money, it's just people spending that isn't theirs don't look too close. There is very little reason to try and scale out, since putting 48 Cores in one server costs you a lot more than putting 48 cores in 2 (as a rule of thumb).
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    The whole model of having your own data centre is dead; if you have one, it's just a dragging anchor with all of the management necessary. Cloud computing is successful for good reasons.
  • nils_ - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Unless there are significant economies of scale at work I agree as far as running a data center goes. However you can also rent parts of a datacenter, get a cage, a rack or whatever. Unless you are actually consuming cloud services instead of just running virtual machines you may be surprised how expensive it can be.

    And with it comes a significant counter-party risk: Your cloud provider can decide to jack up the prices, cancel a cloud service you rely on, be bought by a competitor and change the whole infrastructure etc.., not to mention security and legal issues.

    It makes sense at a certain size or scale, but at some point business continuity is a huge concern, at which point many advantages of the cloud turn into disadvantages. You're talking about the datacenter as an anchor, shackling yourself to "the cloud" can also carry immense risks. I've been reading stories recently about companies moving petabytes of data to a cloud provider, just show me what would happen once you try to get your data out...

    Talk to Oracle customers for example, Oracle has recently doubled license fees for hosting on Amazon (what counted as 1/2 CPU now counts as 1 CPU) in an effort to push their own cloud offering. Now imagine what they'll do once you moved there. I truly believe that the more hosting, storage, compute etc. concentrates in a few companies the worse we'll be off in the long term.
  • fanofanand - Monday, February 20, 2017 - link

    This 10000x over. There are no such things as a free lunch.
  • nils_ - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    I too wonder what the point of these chips is, only thing that makes this special is the insane amount of cache for a 4 core part, maybe there is some sort of application that needs this type of cache? Or Intel is just taking the piss hoping people order them by mistake ;)
  • Samus - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    I guess yields must be good. 60MB cache. Jesus. I remember when servers with 64MB of RAM were elite, now it's on die. LOL.
  • nils_ - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    yeah I 'member, and even the cache wasn't on die.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    Good point.
  • LeptonX - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    That 8K USD E7 CPU is actually useful when you want to maximize performance per core because of the software licensing costs that are per core and you need all the RAS features that other Intel CPUs don't have. So your outrage is just stupid. It all comes down to software licensing per core.
    As it also has a lot of cache so it can actually perform well compared to higher-clocked CPUs but based on quad core dice.
  • Topweasel - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    People keep saying Price per core in Licensing. But I think everyone means Socket. But yeah with highend server software being 5k-10k per Socket. It's all about how many cores you can fit on a socket. Take a decent value CPU like E5-2620 V4 at ~$500. Sure $1500 for three of those seems like a better deal but not when the software you want to run (lets say a low end of 5k per socket). All of a sudden that 10k processor just made all of your money back and in smaller package. You start expanding on that needing 48 full cores, or 96. Still possible in a single machine vs. Having to get 3 or 4 boxes for 8c systems. Now the full server costs get to be added per 32c and you have the 9k CPU actually saving you money.
  • nils_ - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Luckily I don't have to deal much with proprietary software, but I would say that most companies license per core, not per socket. I know that Oracle does.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Microsoft is switching to per-core licensing for some of their products as well.
  • Topweasel - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

    Well now because the core counts have started to increase. I know at my work Vsphere is by socket and host system. You still run into packaging issues. Need 400c worth of a server farm. That's 4 4s servers here. But at 8c per socket, that's 16 4s systems. That's one Rack worth servers versus 3.
  • nils_ - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link

    Of course the price doesn't scale linearly (doubling the amount of sockets more than doubles the price) so that's something you gotta take into account as well.
  • Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    Finally someone hit the nail on the head.

    When bound by per-socket licensing, these chips make huge sense when you need more performance.

    I noted Win Server 2016 is per-core. Yikes.
  • killerchamb - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Xeon E7-8894 for $8898
    Intel is making it easy, the price is in the name ;)

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