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I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? Is it a matter of money sunk into research? Because it seems that in terms of FLOPS per $, AMD always wins, and

by jokoon 9y ago

I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? Is it a matter of money sunk into research? Because it seems that in terms of FLOPS per $, AMD always wins, and I have a hard time understanding that. What makes AMD more interesting?

detaro 9y ago
Other way around: AMD has to be cheaper to compete with Intel, which until now basically could charge what they wanted. And this specific example here is clearl in the high-end enthusiast space, where whoever has the best can charge the highest price and the target market will pay it.
dingo_bat 9y ago
> I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. An example in GPUs are the NVIDIA Quaddro cards. If your frame needs more than 16GB memory to render, there is no other card available. So they sell the same chips packaged as a Quaddro at 5x the price of a Titan.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  I believe the biggest reason the workstation/enterprise GPU lines (AMD’s too) are priced so much higher than the gaming/consumer lines is because the “certifications” for CAD[1] and 3D graphics[2] software cost a king’s ransom plus require expensive testing and validation of every individual card before it’s sold. [1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing... [2] http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html
- gsnedders 9y ago
  > The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?) That said, POWER tends to be even more expensive than this.
  - walki 9y ago
    > How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?) POWER8 is not well suited for HPC workloads as their vector instructions (VMX/AltiVec) are only 128-bit wide vs Intel's latest Skylake Xeon CPUs have vector instructions (AVX512) that are 512-bit wide. For non HPC workloads (e.g. integer arithmetic) the POWER8 CPUs were somehow competitive with Intel's CPUs when they were first released in 2015 but today AMD and Intel's CPUs are clearly faster. From what I can tell CPU enthusiasts were not impressed by the POWER8 CPU architecture.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  It is not so much a "chip that powerful" but a "chip that correct". Gaming GPUs are allowed errors because the rendered images are known to be visual output only, whereas an engineering GPU may be used for hard analysis, which cannot afford any rounding or other classes of the acceptable errors gaming GPUs are allowed.
  - eloff 9y ago
    Are you talking about double-precision floating point math? Or are you saying the gaming chips actually have issues?
    - jackmott 9y ago
      It is just complete nonsense. In fact deep learning/AI chips used for neural networks usually have reduced floating point precision because they don't need it.
      - smitherfield 9y ago
        Deep learning is still a fairly new and small field, scientific computing workloads are usually mostly double-precision.
      - freeone3000 9y ago
        We don't need it because errors in any particular value aren't important - the calculations assume an amount of inherent error greater than that produced by the hardware.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    nonsense
  - tomsmeding 9y ago
    Do you have a source for those claims? It seems highly unlikely to me that certain types of cpu's or gpu's are allowed errors to cut costs. Rounding mechanics are complicated, but I'd say a bug is a bug. As mentioned in a comment by jackmott in this thread, "engineering purposes" also often actively reduce precision for increased performance.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  But for any particular version of "that powerful", the exclusivity doesn't last long. The burning need for hardware that didn't exist a couple years ago and will be mainstream in a couple more years isn't all that strong.
dmix 9y ago
Costs of production rarely determine prices directly for any product - beyond setting the baseline from which the margin measures on. Market dynamics tend to do the rest (competition, market position, etc). Intel plays a role in it but not always. There may be some that are down to the wire per unit cost (typically the cheaper ones) but I have a feeling Intel operates with plenty of margin on most of their higher end products. And plenty of them are the same chip repackaged.
arca_vorago 9y ago
For me, AMD tends to do better with multithreaded/parallel applications, but that tradeoff is at the expense of single core speeds. So mostly it depends on what you are using it for. I built a 64 core opteron server for doing physics calculations and it was probably my favorite build ever, so I can't wait to try the new AMD server lineup, this time I'll only need two CPUs to get 64 cores!
dogma1138 9y ago
Intel operates at 60% gross profit margin, AMD operates primarily in the red. In the past 15 quarters AMD had a single quarter in 2014 where it didn't suffered an operational loss (when the bulk of this generation of console royalties were paid out most likely)

by jokoon 9y ago

detaro 9y ago

Other way around: AMD has to be cheaper to compete with Intel, which until now basically could charge what they wanted. And this specific example here is clearl in the high-end enthusiast space, where whoever has the best can charge the highest price and the target market will pay it.

dingo_bat 9y ago

> I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. An example in GPUs are the NVIDIA Quaddro cards. If your frame needs more than 16GB memory to render, there is no other card available. So they sell the same chips packaged as a Quaddro at 5x the price of a Titan.

smitherfield 9y ago
I believe the biggest reason the workstation/enterprise GPU lines (AMD’s too) are priced so much higher than the gaming/consumer lines is because the “certifications” for CAD[1] and 3D graphics[2] software cost a king’s ransom plus require expensive testing and validation of every individual card before it’s sold. [1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing... [2] http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html
gsnedders 9y ago
> The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?) That said, POWER tends to be even more expensive than this.
- walki 9y ago
  > How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?) POWER8 is not well suited for HPC workloads as their vector instructions (VMX/AltiVec) are only 128-bit wide vs Intel's latest Skylake Xeon CPUs have vector instructions (AVX512) that are 512-bit wide. For non HPC workloads (e.g. integer arithmetic) the POWER8 CPUs were somehow competitive with Intel's CPUs when they were first released in 2015 but today AMD and Intel's CPUs are clearly faster. From what I can tell CPU enthusiasts were not impressed by the POWER8 CPU architecture.
bsenftner 9y ago
It is not so much a "chip that powerful" but a "chip that correct". Gaming GPUs are allowed errors because the rendered images are known to be visual output only, whereas an engineering GPU may be used for hard analysis, which cannot afford any rounding or other classes of the acceptable errors gaming GPUs are allowed.
- eloff 9y ago
  Are you talking about double-precision floating point math? Or are you saying the gaming chips actually have issues?
  - jackmott 9y ago
    It is just complete nonsense. In fact deep learning/AI chips used for neural networks usually have reduced floating point precision because they don't need it.
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      Deep learning is still a fairly new and small field, scientific computing workloads are usually mostly double-precision.
    - freeone3000 9y ago
      We don't need it because errors in any particular value aren't important - the calculations assume an amount of inherent error greater than that produced by the hardware.
- jackmott 9y ago
  nonsense
- tomsmeding 9y ago
  Do you have a source for those claims? It seems highly unlikely to me that certain types of cpu's or gpu's are allowed errors to cut costs. Rounding mechanics are complicated, but I'd say a bug is a bug. As mentioned in a comment by jackmott in this thread, "engineering purposes" also often actively reduce precision for increased performance.
Dylan16807 9y ago
But for any particular version of "that powerful", the exclusivity doesn't last long. The burning need for hardware that didn't exist a couple years ago and will be mainstream in a couple more years isn't all that strong.

dmix 9y ago

Costs of production rarely determine prices directly for any product - beyond setting the baseline from which the margin measures on. Market dynamics tend to do the rest (competition, market position, etc). Intel plays a role in it but not always. There may be some that are down to the wire per unit cost (typically the cheaper ones) but I have a feeling Intel operates with plenty of margin on most of their higher end products. And plenty of them are the same chip repackaged.

arca_vorago 9y ago

For me, AMD tends to do better with multithreaded/parallel applications, but that tradeoff is at the expense of single core speeds. So mostly it depends on what you are using it for. I built a 64 core opteron server for doing physics calculations and it was probably my favorite build ever, so I can't wait to try the new AMD server lineup, this time I'll only need two CPUs to get 64 cores!

dogma1138 9y ago

Intel operates at 60% gross profit margin, AMD operates primarily in the red. In the past 15 quarters AMD had a single quarter in 2014 where it didn't suffered an operational loss (when the bulk of this generation of console royalties were paid out most likely)