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They need to work on making faster cores instead of just throwing a ton of cores at the problem. In the datacenter, we commonly have to pay per-core license cos

They need to work on making faster cores instead of just throwing a ton of cores at the problem. In the datacenter, we commonly have to pay per-core license costs for certain vendor software. I'm not going to pay 7 figures to grow our Oracle license for example by switching to AMD when we can get Intel CPUs with faster, fewer cores.

rmnoon 7y ago
Out of curiosity have you read benchmarks recently on Rome? Per-core performance is quite competitive now (unlike in the recent past).
- RKearney 7y ago
  No but I'll certainly pass the word along. I handle the network and wasn't directly responsible for evaluating AMD. I just heard the reasons why it didn't work and saw the not-so-impressive benchmarks when looking at single core performance. This was 2-3 years ago.
  - philjohn 7y ago
    Power is also a high cost in a good data center, and Epyc also smokes Xeon for perf-per-watt.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    As of Zen2, single core performance is sometimes better, sometimes worse than Intel, depending on the chips being compared and the workload.
  - rdybjhbmyuk 7y ago
    https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
pdimitar 7y ago
You are restating a status quo that's being kept by resident pricing models and a software that nobody bothers to make multicore-friendly. IMO we'll see the bigger hosting players (Google, Amazon etc.) offer competitive prices on their many-core plans and sooner or later the other players will either have to relax their prices or start losing even more customers to the cloud offerings. I could be wrong though. Many customers are hell-bent to never host in the cloud and I'm pretty sure that decision makes total sense in their context. We'll see how things shake out but as a programmer I am seeing a slow but steady shift to making the software (languages and frameworks) multicore-friendly. It's happening with a glacial pace but it does happen.
nwallin 7y ago
AMD is competitive in perf/core now. Intel has been largely stagnant since Skylake, while AMD has been improving dramatically, starting with Zen in 2017. That being said, your organization's problem isn't AMD vs Intel, your problem is Oracle. If your org spent the money you currently spend on Oracle licenses on a bestial monstrosity of a I AM BECOME DEATH DESTROYER OF WORLDS machine running postgres you'd have better performance. Regardless of whether it's AMD or Intel. (although you're probably better off with AMD) I know it's not that simple. Just sayin'. Making sure HN meets its daily Oracle hate quota. Seriously though, Oracle sucks.

rmnoon 7y ago

Out of curiosity have you read benchmarks recently on Rome? Per-core performance is quite competitive now (unlike in the recent past).

RKearney 7y ago
No but I'll certainly pass the word along. I handle the network and wasn't directly responsible for evaluating AMD. I just heard the reasons why it didn't work and saw the not-so-impressive benchmarks when looking at single core performance. This was 2-3 years ago.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Power is also a high cost in a good data center, and Epyc also smokes Xeon for perf-per-watt.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  As of Zen2, single core performance is sometimes better, sometimes worse than Intel, depending on the chips being compared and the workload.
- rdybjhbmyuk 7y ago
  https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

pdimitar 7y ago

You are restating a status quo that's being kept by resident pricing models and a software that nobody bothers to make multicore-friendly. IMO we'll see the bigger hosting players (Google, Amazon etc.) offer competitive prices on their many-core plans and sooner or later the other players will either have to relax their prices or start losing even more customers to the cloud offerings. I could be wrong though. Many customers are hell-bent to never host in the cloud and I'm pretty sure that decision makes total sense in their context. We'll see how things shake out but as a programmer I am seeing a slow but steady shift to making the software (languages and frameworks) multicore-friendly. It's happening with a glacial pace but it does happen.

nwallin 7y ago

AMD is competitive in perf/core now. Intel has been largely stagnant since Skylake, while AMD has been improving dramatically, starting with Zen in 2017. That being said, your organization's problem isn't AMD vs Intel, your problem is Oracle. If your org spent the money you currently spend on Oracle licenses on a bestial monstrosity of a I AM BECOME DEATH DESTROYER OF WORLDS machine running postgres you'd have better performance. Regardless of whether it's AMD or Intel. (although you're probably better off with AMD) I know it's not that simple. Just sayin'. Making sure HN meets its daily Oracle hate quota. Seriously though, Oracle sucks.