4 ms·

Serious question, Who buys these chips? There can't be many people in the world who will pay the 10k-20k price tag. How many people have the pull with their em

Serious question, Who buys these chips? There can't be many people in the world who will pay the 10k-20k price tag. How many people have the pull with their employers to justify it? The production run must be insanely low or i just don't understand the marketplace around high end chips.

dijit 8y ago
Think of it this way; if you're paying the license based on physical CPU socket (commonly the case) then it makes sense to scale vertically. If you're a cloud provider, it also makes sense to have very large capable machines to increase your density. Power consumption in datacenters is typically a significant cost of total hosting. (I pay the same as what a server costs in power consumption per year, per server) So if you can have double the compute, with the same power draw, it's worth double the price in the first year alone, typically servers have a 3-5y life-cycle. So you can extrapolate that to "a server that is double the cost but the same power draw can be worth 5x as much as a slower CPU". but that's the cut-off.. For many servers the flat rate fee of: the license of anything that runs; the motherboard, the drives, the memory, the PSU, the cabling, the space, the power consumption means that it can be economical to egregiously spec out on CPU; if that's the bottleneck which is the case in a lot of virtual or build environments.
tofu8 8y ago
Professionals in: VFX/3D (which is why they use Cinebench as a benchmark), game developers (UE4), industrial design. These are multi-billion dollar industries.
jpalomaki 8y ago
Might be bargain if your software vendor is still selling licenses ”per socket” (joke, I guess everybody has migrated to per core or something more complicated). To put hardware prices to perspective, think how much it costs to run even a small development team. If hardware makes them more productive and/or happier, most of the time you should go for it. Sad too see expensive people stuck with mediocre tools.
stephengillie 8y ago
This poster links to Anandtech, who suggests these are for home use.[0] Another poster suggests the TDP is over 300W.[1] For a home computing device component, that's quite the pricetag. With the amount of heat it generates, maybe Intel could market it as a combination processor and space heater? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235900 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235951
usefulcat 8y ago
I could see HFT trading shops potentially buying these, especially if they come out with a Xeon version.
trhway 8y ago
>There can't be many people in the world who will pay the 10k-20k price tag. How many people have the pull with their employers to justify it? our current 2 x 14C workstations are $10-12K - and we're just a lowly no-pull devs in a BigCo not known for any lavishness toward low level rank and file.
stagger87 8y ago
Workstations are a common target for these CPUs. In my field, EDA software, FPGA development. A lot of software development I do with SDRs benefit from high core count, high frequency Intel CPUs.

dijit 8y ago

Think of it this way; if you're paying the license based on physical CPU socket (commonly the case) then it makes sense to scale vertically. If you're a cloud provider, it also makes sense to have very large capable machines to increase your density. Power consumption in datacenters is typically a significant cost of total hosting. (I pay the same as what a server costs in power consumption per year, per server) So if you can have double the compute, with the same power draw, it's worth double the price in the first year alone, typically servers have a 3-5y life-cycle. So you can extrapolate that to "a server that is double the cost but the same power draw can be worth 5x as much as a slower CPU". but that's the cut-off.. For many servers the flat rate fee of: the license of anything that runs; the motherboard, the drives, the memory, the PSU, the cabling, the space, the power consumption means that it can be economical to egregiously spec out on CPU; if that's the bottleneck which is the case in a lot of virtual or build environments.

tofu8 8y ago

Professionals in: VFX/3D (which is why they use Cinebench as a benchmark), game developers (UE4), industrial design. These are multi-billion dollar industries.

jpalomaki 8y ago

Might be bargain if your software vendor is still selling licenses ”per socket” (joke, I guess everybody has migrated to per core or something more complicated). To put hardware prices to perspective, think how much it costs to run even a small development team. If hardware makes them more productive and/or happier, most of the time you should go for it. Sad too see expensive people stuck with mediocre tools.

stephengillie 8y ago

This poster links to Anandtech, who suggests these are for home use.[0] Another poster suggests the TDP is over 300W.[1] For a home computing device component, that's quite the pricetag. With the amount of heat it generates, maybe Intel could market it as a combination processor and space heater? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235900 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17235951

usefulcat 8y ago

I could see HFT trading shops potentially buying these, especially if they come out with a Xeon version.

trhway 8y ago

>There can't be many people in the world who will pay the 10k-20k price tag. How many people have the pull with their employers to justify it? our current 2 x 14C workstations are $10-12K - and we're just a lowly no-pull devs in a BigCo not known for any lavishness toward low level rank and file.

stagger87 8y ago

Workstations are a common target for these CPUs. In my field, EDA software, FPGA development. A lot of software development I do with SDRs benefit from high core count, high frequency Intel CPUs.