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Large core counts are the bread and butter of enterprise/cloud. I suspect Intel is binning those chips for their real customers (not desktop users). Probably ha
by deelowe 11y ago
Large core counts are the bread and butter of enterprise/cloud. I suspect Intel is binning those chips for their real customers (not desktop users). Probably has to do with wafer yields or something if I can hazard a guess.
- arielweisberg 11y agoI don't think so because it's not the same layout. Server's don't have GPUs and not the same GPUs when they have stuff for CUDA. They also don't use the same sockets or number of memory channels.
- deelowe 11y agoI meant high core count CPUs (intel), not GPUs.
- arielweisberg 11y agoThe desktop chips and server chips are not the same chips. You can't bin a different chip as something else. Binning is the practice of taking identical silicon and separating it based on grade and functionality (disabling cores, turning off functionality etc.). Server CPUs don't even use the same sockets they are fundamentally different.
- deelowe 11y agoI was talking about wafers, not dies, but it's all speculation regardless.
- sliverstorm 11y agoBy now they probably have the yields. I'd guess it's just market segmentation. Harder to convince your server customers to fork out $4k for a 16-core chip when you're selling 16-core chips into desktops for $300.
- deelowe 11y agoActually, I suspect you're right. I was being a bit generous with my characterization. :-) Maintaining the status quo allows Intel to add significant margin to their enterprise solutions.
- seanp2k2 11y agoYou can get a laptop with a Xeon these days, and dual socket workstations are plentiful. They're getting the 8+ core Xeons in many cases now: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ 36-core workstation based on Xeons: http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html Makes your MBP look pretty cheesy when you could have something like that under your desk. Then again, for developing rails and angular apps, you don't actually need it, and the PCI-E SSD makes a bigger difference in practice (you can RAID 0 NVME SSDs in workstations too though).