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I'd bet that the cloud-scale customers like AWS negotiate pricing that has very little to do with the published list price of these CPUs.

• colechristensen 9y ago
  More than that, Intel builds custom chips to AWS specs.
  • klodolph 9y ago
    Kind of. From what I understand, any customer large enough can get small features added, and they just get turned off for the other customers.
    • gsnedders 9y ago
      Depends on the feature, as far as I can tell. Intel has been known to do entirely custom chips, if the price is right (and realistically, you need lots of volume to be able to justify the setup cost of it).
      • temac 9y ago
        If we are talking about modern processors, I doubt they are going to do custom masks.
      • klodolph 9y ago
        There's no way the price is right for custom Skylake Xeons, especially considering how easy it is to disable features on chips after you make them.
• ethbro 9y ago
  And I think this is possibly one reason for the pricing. When a >50% (guessing, any better numbers?) of new chip sales volume comes from a few hyperscale buyers with individually negotiated contracts, you're far more flexible with what you do for the remainder. Heck, Intel might even not really have the production volume on all SKUs to sell to non-hyperscale! And if that's true, then why would they do anything other than milk the few customers it deigns to sell to?
  • tachyonbeam 9y ago
    That could be one reason why it's priced so high: because they wouldn't be able to make enough to meet demand otherwise. They can price it extremely high to keep demand under control, and negotiate special pricing with a few selected customers that they really care about pleasing.
• late2part 9y ago
  What % of Intel's sales by volume do you think goes to AWS, GCP, Azure?