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This line is the kicker for me: "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." The rest of the paragraph

This line is the kicker for me: "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." The rest of the paragraph twists the knife more, and declares there to be an open market on server hardware for AMD and Ampere to fight it out. With application stacks being what they are and optimizations for Xeon so deeply integrated, it's unlikely that folks running private datacenters actually feel the same way, but if I was spinning up a new company with the sort of funding to be able to decide between self-hosted or cloud I would have some math to do.

nine_k 6y ago
I can imagine that every cloud hosting provider expands their fleet of machines, and also retires and replaces some of it. If the expansion and replacement will mostly involve AMD and ARM-based solutions, I won't be surprised. Of course Xeons are going to stay for a relatively long time, because some customers are deeply invested in them, e.g. relying on AVX512 heavily, etc. I also don't think that Intel is going to go under. AMD was in the position of a second-rate player for decades, and had expensive failures, too (remember Bulldozer?). So I expect them to regroup and show us something amazing in, say, 5 years. But one thing they are.going to lose: their sweet big margins.
- klelatti 6y ago
  I think the big issues for Intel will be avoiding getting into a vicious circle of uncompetitive performance -> lower margins -> less investment in process /fabs -> uncompetitive performance In part AMD broke out of this by using TSMC, but Intel relying on (not just using) TSMC would be a huge step.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    I bet there will be enough interest in keeping a top-tier fab facility and expertise on the US soil. If I were DoD, I would be very interested, for instance.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      Probably connected: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/317329-tsmc-will-open-3-5-billion-semiconductor-fab-in-arizona https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/317329-tsmc-will-ope... Not sure if it has to be absolutely top-tier for defense purposes though.
      - nine_k 6y ago
        You can go with larger nodes and larger power budgets for avionics and other electronic stuff in battlefield machines. OTOH you'd rather be top-notch in your communication equipment, low-power sensors for reconnaissance, etc. In some areas, having a US-controlled 7 nm fab may matter even for DoD.
        klelatti 6y ago
        Interesting - thanks.
      - ATsch 6y ago
        I personally expect those plans to be dropped or cut back relatively soon as Trump leaves office. I don't think the 2024 date for this plan was at all a coincidence. Taiwan is extremely shifty about their semiconductor tech leaving the island. Of course, 5nm would be very outdated by then either way.
mhh__ 6y ago
Intel are also miles ahead when it comes to software and documentation. Intel's optimization guide alone is about 1000 pages long, AMD's isn't as good and they've been at it for decades now. If you have the money Intel aren't as competitive any more, but for the middle ground where you don't have the budget to bring up your own software it's not the same calculus.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  This is an important point. Intel has a quite mature performance analysis stack that AMD doesn't match. Their performance management unit in Skylake-SP and later is very capable, and the one in Tiger Lake, Ice lake or later doubles the number of counters and adds other abilities. It's a software ecosystem that allows you to get a very high level of performance out of your software, if your shop is building its own software.
jeffbee 6y ago
that’s a statement refuted by the article in which it appears, though. The Ampere system is clearly not suited to latency-sensitive application services, unless you’re just looking to double your latency for no reason. If you looked at these specjbb results because you’re shopping for Java backend servers then you’re buying Xeon yet again.
- rrss 6y ago
  It's not refuted, because Ampere isn't the only competitor. The statement is that with AMD EPYC and Ampere Altra as options, Intel Xeon loses everywhere.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    I don't really think that's a supportable statement. The Xeon's outlier latency on specjbb is superior until it hits its throughput limits. A lot of machines are bought on the basis of latency, not throughput. Also you really have to grind your teeth to get past AnandTech's habit of comparing, on a performance-per-dollar basis, just whatever CPU that happen to have laying around. The entire reason the Xeon Platinum costs $10000 is because it scales to 8 sockets, a level needed only by people who have backed themselves into a corner with Oracle or SAP and who now need a gigantic single host at any price. Anyone who was actually planning to build a 2-socket server would choose the Xeon Gold 6258R with the same core count, the same cache, higher clocks, and less than half the price. Suddenly when you make a comparison to a comparable product, you find that Intel has the cheapest product of the three, along with certain favorable performance aspects.
waynesonfire 6y ago
> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Right? "This platform does/does not run my software" is a huge checkbox when buying computers. The viewpoint of people who actually specify, buy, and operate servers at scale is severely underrepresented in these discussions.
  - coder543 6y ago
    Keep in mind that Intel also has to compete with AMD... and AMD is also x86_64. AMD and Altra are trading blows at the high end of performance, as seen in this article, while Intel is... not, except in extremely specialized applications. Intel servers don't even offer PCIe 4.0 at this time, which is just a bad joke when it comes to building out servers with lots of high performance storage and networking. For now, Intel offers (relatively) poor CPU performance and poor peripheral performance. So, if your software can't run on Altra, the other choice for high performing servers is AMD, not Intel, unless you're just locked into Intel for historical reasons. Intel does have some nice budget offerings for cheap servers, though, such as Xeon D.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Ironically Xeon-D seems to have been quietly cancelled.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    So you're never going to consider moving to another architecture because your software (currently) doesn't run on it? So Amazon made a huge mistake with Graviton then? Last time I checked Amazon 'specify, buy, and operate servers at scale'.
elteto 6y ago
AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on consumer's desktops/laptops: they brought down the "subjective" barrier against ARM, which is much harder to break sometimes than the technological one. But ARM CPUs for everything else that is not an Apple product is up for grabs. The M1 is extremely competitive but it will never leave Apple's realm (unless Apple wants to start competing on the CPU business, but I see that going very strongly against Apple's consumer focus). It is incredible, looking at it in retrospective, but Apple opened up (or normalized, if you will) a whole new market for ARM products.
- ipodopt 6y ago
  The RISC-V ISA would be the better bet. a. They start investing now and they can have some leverage in the spec. b. The spec is minimal and open to expansion that it sets itself up for more domain specific processors. Which we will be seeing alot more of thanks to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth. c. There is a pretty big theme of moving toward more open and democratized standards in tech. d. They would be the big dogs in RISC-V where as ARM already has big players. e. In both ARM and RISC-V they would be saving the need for extra transistors. My understanding is that there are extra transistors that basically translate x86 machine code to some internal RISC ISA for performance reasons on x86 processors. Due to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth and the maturation of external Fabs Intel and AMD will no longer be able to 'hide' this deficit. f. No royalties
  - spamizbad 6y ago
    Not sure if it's still the case but RISC-V was beating ARM in code size as well
    - ipodopt 6y ago
      I find that a bit surprising since my understanding is RISC-V is more minimal (has fewer higher level instructions) (ATM, that will change with extensions) then ARM. This paper refutes your point and is inline with my understanding: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perotti.pdf https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perot... One counter point is the simpler the ISA the more work the compiler needs to do. So x86 is may be easier to write an optimize compiler for given it does some of the work for you (despite the bloat). I wonder how much benchmarks on the current ARM and RISK-V chips will change over time due to compiler improvements. ARM probably already has alot of investment in some workloads... EDIT: This presentation show code size comparisons with a RISC-V extension that adds multiply/divide and it get really close to ARM: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co...
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
I can't wait to see if the engineering teams from Cavium push Marvel back into the ring. Cavium was designing an Arm server to compete with Intel for years before they switched to HPC. The market is primed. Intel is in serious trouble (I know, people have been saying this since NexGen in 1995, but for real real this time!)
- wmf 6y ago
  Marvell/Cavium just canceled their server processors.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    I thought they cancelled years ago and switched to HPC. Something recent?
    - wmf 6y ago
      Earlier this year ThunderX 3 was pitched as a server processor, then it was hyperscale-only, then it was canceled.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jstrong 6y ago
are there any good articles about what has gone so, so wrong at intel in the last few years?
- toast0 6y ago
  I have yet to see an article with details about what went wrong in their fab process, but something seriously went wrong with their 10 nm fab process. Yields are low, many years in, and there were large delays. This messed up their whole CPU development pipeline, because their designs are tightly bound to the process node, and it's a multi-year process. Because 10 nm hasn't ever worked in volume, and their new CPU designs are based around 10 nm, their latest server chips are still based on optimized Skylake microarchitecture, which was first released in 2015. Early indications are that Intel's next process node (which they're calling 7nm) is also experiencing problems, if those problems aren't resolved, that probably means they'll have cpu designs for 7nm that they also can't ship in volume, in addition to the 10nm designs. If they can figure out their fab issues, and they don't have a corporate implosion, I'm guessing they'll start making competitive CPUs again; they've been way behind before and come back (anti-competitive practices helped make sure they had the finances for that, of course).
- cbozeman 6y ago
  There's a lot of great stuff at SemiAccurate throughout the years that details what went wrong at Intel and why. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it because Charlie has a practical stranglehold on semiconductor inside information. And Charlie is a bit of a polarizing figure. He's gotten some things hilariously wrong, but he's also been dead on the money for a lot of issues, and his documentation of what's happening / happened at Intel is pretty much crystal clear. You could probably browse through all the 10nm articles there and get a good idea of what happened without purchasing a subscription, if you have a decent knowledge of the semiconductor industry. EDIT: If you read though these articles, even the parts that are available to non-registered users, a pretty clear picture starts to emerge - https://www.semiaccurate.com/tag/10nm/ https://www.semiaccurate.com/tag/10nm/
bradfa 6y ago
I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do. For some workloads, special things like AES-NI or other optimizations which only Intel (or another vendor) have can make a huge difference in real world performance which generalized benchmarks don't cover.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do. AMD in Zen1 had 2x AES-pipelines, allowing 2x 128-bit AES operations per clocktick. Intel caught up later, and eventually also added 2x AES-pipelines of their own. But then AMD added 256-bit AES instructions to Zen3 (which are 128-bit x2 vectorized). AVX512 does have 4x SIMD AES on AVX512 (4x128 bit wide), for 4x parallel AES computations per clock tick. But that's not on consumer chips. I guess that's the widest AES implementation right now however, but AMD isn't that far behind in Zen3. -------- If anything, I'd say AMD actually was beating Intel at the AES-benchmark at Zen1 (In year ~2017 or so), but Intel / AMD have been trading blows with each other since then.
  - bradfa 6y ago
    I haven't been able to test any Zen 3 CPUs. Now I'm curious! From benchmarks listed here: https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html it seems that Intel had similar performance in their 2015 release of the i7-6700 as AMD's 2017 release of Ryzen 7 1800X. Raw general purpose benchmarks I found via Google put the Ryzen 7 1800X at about twice the compute capability as an i7-6700, but their AES performance is quite even.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      CBC mode cannot be parallelized. That is a sequential-only algorithm, and none of the stuff I talked about before can take advantage of CBC mode. GCM mode can be parallelized. Notice AES-128-GCM (which can take advantage of 2x pipelines) really flies on Zen1 compared to 6700.
ksec 6y ago
>.....With application stacks being what they are and optimizations for Xeon so deeply integrated...... That is of course in the context of Server CPU design. Your mileage will vary depending your usage. With the announcement from Marvell's exit [1] of ARM Server CPU it is now all but confirmed that Microsoft and Google are also working on their own ARM Server CPU. Which means all HyperScaler will now have a common interest to have Software running on ARM. And this will trickle down to every part of the industry. It will take some time, depending on your scale, the cost benefits of switching over may be different. But there is no denying that Intel doesn't have a short term ( 2-3 years ) answer. And I dont see their medium term ( 4 - 5 years ) are any better. Their new Optane SSD is really exciting though [2]. And I am willing to bet all of these New Server CPU comers has absolutely zero experience in CPU forecasting, and risk averse enough to put down commitment on capacity, which ultimately leads to TSMC getting a bad name yet again for "Not Enough Capacity". [1] https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-marvell-thunderx3-general-purpose-skus-canceled/ https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-marvell-thunderx3-gen... [2] https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwpd-ssd-dominates-pcie-gen4/ https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...
spockz 6y ago
The reason why the M1 performs so well, next to its insanely wide out of order capabilities, is that Apple placed Specialized processors really close and gave everything a fast connection. Then because they control a large part of The OS and applications they rewrote the underlying macOS libraries and the applications to make use of these specific co processors. They were able to achieve this because they are vertically integrated. When AMD would switch to RISC they could also create a huge out of order capable cpu but would be lacking the co processors plus the tight integration and if they could add them they would lack the capability to drive and dictate that the cpu would be used in the most performant way. So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market and AMD as a general purpose cpu designer will need to come with a very competitive cpu either on x86 (ZenX) or on RISC to stay competitive. They can outsource the fabrication the chips. Intel meanwhile with its owned fabs has a lot more inertia and ego to turn around. On the other hand, maybe AMD or Intel will find a way to increase the re-order buffer and the amount of “splicer” (I forgot the official name for the unit that takes the instruction code and translates it into chunks of microcode).
- avianlyric 6y ago
  I have to disagree with this, I really don’t think that Apple is a competitor here. The M1 chip is undoubtably a remarkable piece of engineering. But it quite clear that Apple are never going to sell it standalone. It also seems extremely unlikely that Apple are going to get back into the server game again. Apple sell high markup, low volume (relatively) products. Data centre severs are the opposite, and Apple have stated quite explicitly they’re not interested in building anything that isn’t a high margin, luxury, product. In the consumer space, I can see Apple taking more market share. But again, the vast majority of PC are either business machines, or low margin consumer machines. Both markets that Apple doesn’t seem to be that interested in diving into (their enterprise support is crap, and see above regarding low margin goods for the consumer market). In all I must disagree with this statement > So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market Not because Apple doesn’t have the technical chops to do it. But because they just aren’t interested in that market. As such I think AMD, and other ARM manufacturers have everything to play for, and no need to worry about Apple.

nine_k 6y ago

I can imagine that every cloud hosting provider expands their fleet of machines, and also retires and replaces some of it. If the expansion and replacement will mostly involve AMD and ARM-based solutions, I won't be surprised. Of course Xeons are going to stay for a relatively long time, because some customers are deeply invested in them, e.g. relying on AVX512 heavily, etc. I also don't think that Intel is going to go under. AMD was in the position of a second-rate player for decades, and had expensive failures, too (remember Bulldozer?). So I expect them to regroup and show us something amazing in, say, 5 years. But one thing they are.going to lose: their sweet big margins.

klelatti 6y ago
I think the big issues for Intel will be avoiding getting into a vicious circle of uncompetitive performance -> lower margins -> less investment in process /fabs -> uncompetitive performance In part AMD broke out of this by using TSMC, but Intel relying on (not just using) TSMC would be a huge step.
- nine_k 6y ago
  I bet there will be enough interest in keeping a top-tier fab facility and expertise on the US soil. If I were DoD, I would be very interested, for instance.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Probably connected: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/317329-tsmc-will-open-3-5-billion-semiconductor-fab-in-arizona https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/317329-tsmc-will-ope... Not sure if it has to be absolutely top-tier for defense purposes though.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      You can go with larger nodes and larger power budgets for avionics and other electronic stuff in battlefield machines. OTOH you'd rather be top-notch in your communication equipment, low-power sensors for reconnaissance, etc. In some areas, having a US-controlled 7 nm fab may matter even for DoD.
      - klelatti 6y ago
        Interesting - thanks.
    - ATsch 6y ago
      I personally expect those plans to be dropped or cut back relatively soon as Trump leaves office. I don't think the 2024 date for this plan was at all a coincidence. Taiwan is extremely shifty about their semiconductor tech leaving the island. Of course, 5nm would be very outdated by then either way.

mhh__ 6y ago

Intel are also miles ahead when it comes to software and documentation. Intel's optimization guide alone is about 1000 pages long, AMD's isn't as good and they've been at it for decades now. If you have the money Intel aren't as competitive any more, but for the middle ground where you don't have the budget to bring up your own software it's not the same calculus.

jeffbee 6y ago
This is an important point. Intel has a quite mature performance analysis stack that AMD doesn't match. Their performance management unit in Skylake-SP and later is very capable, and the one in Tiger Lake, Ice lake or later doubles the number of counters and adds other abilities. It's a software ecosystem that allows you to get a very high level of performance out of your software, if your shop is building its own software.

jeffbee 6y ago

that’s a statement refuted by the article in which it appears, though. The Ampere system is clearly not suited to latency-sensitive application services, unless you’re just looking to double your latency for no reason. If you looked at these specjbb results because you’re shopping for Java backend servers then you’re buying Xeon yet again.

rrss 6y ago
It's not refuted, because Ampere isn't the only competitor. The statement is that with AMD EPYC and Ampere Altra as options, Intel Xeon loses everywhere.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  I don't really think that's a supportable statement. The Xeon's outlier latency on specjbb is superior until it hits its throughput limits. A lot of machines are bought on the basis of latency, not throughput. Also you really have to grind your teeth to get past AnandTech's habit of comparing, on a performance-per-dollar basis, just whatever CPU that happen to have laying around. The entire reason the Xeon Platinum costs $10000 is because it scales to 8 sockets, a level needed only by people who have backed themselves into a corner with Oracle or SAP and who now need a gigantic single host at any price. Anyone who was actually planning to build a 2-socket server would choose the Xeon Gold 6258R with the same core count, the same cache, higher clocks, and less than half the price. Suddenly when you make a comparison to a comparable product, you find that Intel has the cheapest product of the three, along with certain favorable performance aspects.

waynesonfire 6y ago

> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.

jeffbee 6y ago
Right? "This platform does/does not run my software" is a huge checkbox when buying computers. The viewpoint of people who actually specify, buy, and operate servers at scale is severely underrepresented in these discussions.
- coder543 6y ago
  Keep in mind that Intel also has to compete with AMD... and AMD is also x86_64. AMD and Altra are trading blows at the high end of performance, as seen in this article, while Intel is... not, except in extremely specialized applications. Intel servers don't even offer PCIe 4.0 at this time, which is just a bad joke when it comes to building out servers with lots of high performance storage and networking. For now, Intel offers (relatively) poor CPU performance and poor peripheral performance. So, if your software can't run on Altra, the other choice for high performing servers is AMD, not Intel, unless you're just locked into Intel for historical reasons. Intel does have some nice budget offerings for cheap servers, though, such as Xeon D.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Ironically Xeon-D seems to have been quietly cancelled.
- klelatti 6y ago
  So you're never going to consider moving to another architecture because your software (currently) doesn't run on it? So Amazon made a huge mistake with Graviton then? Last time I checked Amazon 'specify, buy, and operate servers at scale'.

elteto 6y ago

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on consumer's desktops/laptops: they brought down the "subjective" barrier against ARM, which is much harder to break sometimes than the technological one. But ARM CPUs for everything else that is not an Apple product is up for grabs. The M1 is extremely competitive but it will never leave Apple's realm (unless Apple wants to start competing on the CPU business, but I see that going very strongly against Apple's consumer focus). It is incredible, looking at it in retrospective, but Apple opened up (or normalized, if you will) a whole new market for ARM products.

ipodopt 6y ago
The RISC-V ISA would be the better bet. a. They start investing now and they can have some leverage in the spec. b. The spec is minimal and open to expansion that it sets itself up for more domain specific processors. Which we will be seeing alot more of thanks to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth. c. There is a pretty big theme of moving toward more open and democratized standards in tech. d. They would be the big dogs in RISC-V where as ARM already has big players. e. In both ARM and RISC-V they would be saving the need for extra transistors. My understanding is that there are extra transistors that basically translate x86 machine code to some internal RISC ISA for performance reasons on x86 processors. Due to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth and the maturation of external Fabs Intel and AMD will no longer be able to 'hide' this deficit. f. No royalties
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Not sure if it's still the case but RISC-V was beating ARM in code size as well
  - ipodopt 6y ago
    I find that a bit surprising since my understanding is RISC-V is more minimal (has fewer higher level instructions) (ATM, that will change with extensions) then ARM. This paper refutes your point and is inline with my understanding: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perotti.pdf https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perot... One counter point is the simpler the ISA the more work the compiler needs to do. So x86 is may be easier to write an optimize compiler for given it does some of the work for you (despite the bloat). I wonder how much benchmarks on the current ARM and RISK-V chips will change over time due to compiler improvements. ARM probably already has alot of investment in some workloads... EDIT: This presentation show code size comparisons with a RISC-V extension that adds multiply/divide and it get really close to ARM: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co...

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

I can't wait to see if the engineering teams from Cavium push Marvel back into the ring. Cavium was designing an Arm server to compete with Intel for years before they switched to HPC. The market is primed. Intel is in serious trouble (I know, people have been saying this since NexGen in 1995, but for real real this time!)

wmf 6y ago
Marvell/Cavium just canceled their server processors.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  I thought they cancelled years ago and switched to HPC. Something recent?
  - wmf 6y ago
    Earlier this year ThunderX 3 was pitched as a server processor, then it was hyperscale-only, then it was canceled.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jstrong 6y ago

are there any good articles about what has gone so, so wrong at intel in the last few years?

toast0 6y ago
I have yet to see an article with details about what went wrong in their fab process, but something seriously went wrong with their 10 nm fab process. Yields are low, many years in, and there were large delays. This messed up their whole CPU development pipeline, because their designs are tightly bound to the process node, and it's a multi-year process. Because 10 nm hasn't ever worked in volume, and their new CPU designs are based around 10 nm, their latest server chips are still based on optimized Skylake microarchitecture, which was first released in 2015. Early indications are that Intel's next process node (which they're calling 7nm) is also experiencing problems, if those problems aren't resolved, that probably means they'll have cpu designs for 7nm that they also can't ship in volume, in addition to the 10nm designs. If they can figure out their fab issues, and they don't have a corporate implosion, I'm guessing they'll start making competitive CPUs again; they've been way behind before and come back (anti-competitive practices helped make sure they had the finances for that, of course).
cbozeman 6y ago
There's a lot of great stuff at SemiAccurate throughout the years that details what went wrong at Intel and why. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it because Charlie has a practical stranglehold on semiconductor inside information. And Charlie is a bit of a polarizing figure. He's gotten some things hilariously wrong, but he's also been dead on the money for a lot of issues, and his documentation of what's happening / happened at Intel is pretty much crystal clear. You could probably browse through all the 10nm articles there and get a good idea of what happened without purchasing a subscription, if you have a decent knowledge of the semiconductor industry. EDIT: If you read though these articles, even the parts that are available to non-registered users, a pretty clear picture starts to emerge - https://www.semiaccurate.com/tag/10nm/ https://www.semiaccurate.com/tag/10nm/

bradfa 6y ago

I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do. For some workloads, special things like AES-NI or other optimizations which only Intel (or another vendor) have can make a huge difference in real world performance which generalized benchmarks don't cover.

dragontamer 6y ago
> I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do. AMD in Zen1 had 2x AES-pipelines, allowing 2x 128-bit AES operations per clocktick. Intel caught up later, and eventually also added 2x AES-pipelines of their own. But then AMD added 256-bit AES instructions to Zen3 (which are 128-bit x2 vectorized). AVX512 does have 4x SIMD AES on AVX512 (4x128 bit wide), for 4x parallel AES computations per clock tick. But that's not on consumer chips. I guess that's the widest AES implementation right now however, but AMD isn't that far behind in Zen3. -------- If anything, I'd say AMD actually was beating Intel at the AES-benchmark at Zen1 (In year ~2017 or so), but Intel / AMD have been trading blows with each other since then.
- bradfa 6y ago
  I haven't been able to test any Zen 3 CPUs. Now I'm curious! From benchmarks listed here: https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html it seems that Intel had similar performance in their 2015 release of the i7-6700 as AMD's 2017 release of Ryzen 7 1800X. Raw general purpose benchmarks I found via Google put the Ryzen 7 1800X at about twice the compute capability as an i7-6700, but their AES performance is quite even.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    CBC mode cannot be parallelized. That is a sequential-only algorithm, and none of the stuff I talked about before can take advantage of CBC mode. GCM mode can be parallelized. Notice AES-128-GCM (which can take advantage of 2x pipelines) really flies on Zen1 compared to 6700.

ksec 6y ago

>.....With application stacks being what they are and optimizations for Xeon so deeply integrated...... That is of course in the context of Server CPU design. Your mileage will vary depending your usage. With the announcement from Marvell's exit [1] of ARM Server CPU it is now all but confirmed that Microsoft and Google are also working on their own ARM Server CPU. Which means all HyperScaler will now have a common interest to have Software running on ARM. And this will trickle down to every part of the industry. It will take some time, depending on your scale, the cost benefits of switching over may be different. But there is no denying that Intel doesn't have a short term ( 2-3 years ) answer. And I dont see their medium term ( 4 - 5 years ) are any better. Their new Optane SSD is really exciting though [2]. And I am willing to bet all of these New Server CPU comers has absolutely zero experience in CPU forecasting, and risk averse enough to put down commitment on capacity, which ultimately leads to TSMC getting a bad name yet again for "Not Enough Capacity". [1] https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-marvell-thunderx3-general-purpose-skus-canceled/ https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-marvell-thunderx3-gen... [2] https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwpd-ssd-dominates-pcie-gen4/ https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...

spockz 6y ago

The reason why the M1 performs so well, next to its insanely wide out of order capabilities, is that Apple placed Specialized processors really close and gave everything a fast connection. Then because they control a large part of The OS and applications they rewrote the underlying macOS libraries and the applications to make use of these specific co processors. They were able to achieve this because they are vertically integrated. When AMD would switch to RISC they could also create a huge out of order capable cpu but would be lacking the co processors plus the tight integration and if they could add them they would lack the capability to drive and dictate that the cpu would be used in the most performant way. So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market and AMD as a general purpose cpu designer will need to come with a very competitive cpu either on x86 (ZenX) or on RISC to stay competitive. They can outsource the fabrication the chips. Intel meanwhile with its owned fabs has a lot more inertia and ego to turn around. On the other hand, maybe AMD or Intel will find a way to increase the re-order buffer and the amount of “splicer” (I forgot the official name for the unit that takes the instruction code and translates it into chunks of microcode).

avianlyric 6y ago
I have to disagree with this, I really don’t think that Apple is a competitor here. The M1 chip is undoubtably a remarkable piece of engineering. But it quite clear that Apple are never going to sell it standalone. It also seems extremely unlikely that Apple are going to get back into the server game again. Apple sell high markup, low volume (relatively) products. Data centre severs are the opposite, and Apple have stated quite explicitly they’re not interested in building anything that isn’t a high margin, luxury, product. In the consumer space, I can see Apple taking more market share. But again, the vast majority of PC are either business machines, or low margin consumer machines. Both markets that Apple doesn’t seem to be that interested in diving into (their enterprise support is crap, and see above regarding low margin goods for the consumer market). In all I must disagree with this statement > So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market Not because Apple doesn’t have the technical chops to do it. But because they just aren’t interested in that market. As such I think AMD, and other ARM manufacturers have everything to play for, and no need to worry about Apple.