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From Anandtech[1]: "As impressive as the new Xeon 8380 is from a generational and technical stand-point, what really matters at the end of the day is how it fa

From Anandtech[1]: "As impressive as the new Xeon 8380 is from a generational and technical stand-point, what really matters at the end of the day is how it fares up to the competition. I’ll be blunt here; nobody really expected the new ICL-SP parts to beat AMD or the new Arm competition – and it didn’t. The competitive gap had been so gigantic, with silly scenarios such as where a competing 1-socket systems would outperform Intel’s 2-socket solutions. Ice Lake SP gets rid of those more embarrassing situations, and narrows the performance gap significantly, however the gap still remains, and is still undeniable." This sounds about right for a company fraught with so many process problems lately: Play catch up for a while and hope you experience fewer in the future to continue to narrow the gap. "Narrow the gap significantly" sounds like good technical progress for Intel. But the business message isn't wonderful. 1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16594/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-scalable-review/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16594/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-scal...

jvanderbot 6y ago
Furthermore: "At the end of the day, Ice Lake SP is a success. Performance is up, and performance per watt is up. I'm sure if we were able to test Intel's acceleration enhancements more thoroughly, we would be able to corroborate some of the results and hype that Intel wants to generate around its product. But even as a success, it’s not a traditional competitive success. The generational improvements are there and they are large, and as long as Intel is the market share leader, this should translate into upgraded systems and deployments throughout the enterprise industry. Intel is still in a tough competitive situation overall with the high quality the rest of the market is enabling."
- jandrese 6y ago
  I found it a little weird that they conclusions section didn't mention the AMD or ARM competition at all, given that the Intel chip seemed to be behind them in most of the tests.
  - jvanderbot 6y ago
    You mean OP didn't? Yes, that's probably standard PR to focus on strengths rather than competition.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      I mean the Anand piece.
      - jvanderbot 6y ago
        The conclusions section was quoted in my post and they explicitly mention it. "As impressive as the new Xeon 8380 is from a generational and technical stand-point, what really matters at the end of the day is how it fares up to the competition. I’ll be blunt here; nobody really expected the new ICL-SP parts to beat AMD or the new Arm competition – and it didn’t. "
ajross 6y ago
I don't know that it's all so bad. The final takeaway is that a 660mm2 Intel die at 270W got about 70-80% of the performance that AMD's 1000mm2 MCM gets at 250W. So performance per transistor is similar, but per watt Intel lags. But then the idle draw was significantly better (AMD's idle power remains a problem across the Zen designs), so for many use cases it's probably a draw. That sounds "competetive enough" to me in the datacenter world, given the existing market lead Intel has.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I would argue that for high-end servers, idle draw is a bit of a non-issue as presumably either you have only one of these machines and it’s sitting idle (so no matter how inefficient it doesn’t matter) or you have hundreds/thousands of them and they’ll be as far from idle as it’s possible to be. AMD’s idle power consumption is a bigger issue for desktop, laptop, and HEDT.
  - ajross 6y ago
    Electricity costs for large datacenters are higher than the equipment costs. They absolutely care about idle draw.
    - spideymans 6y ago
      Shouldn't datacenters attempt to minimize idle time though? A server sitting at idle is a depreciating asset that could likely be put to more productive use if tasks were rescheduled to take advantage of idle time (this would also reduce the total number of servers needed).
      - gumby 6y ago
        That is definitely the objective but the reality is that load is not* uniform over the day. So you are paying to keep some number of servers hot (I don't know about spinup/spindown practices in modern datacenters). I doubt this applies to HPC (the target market for this part) as they either schedule jobs closely or could, I imagine, shut them down. But I'm not in that space either so this is merely conjecture. * I am sure there are corner cases where the load is uniform, but they are by definition few.
quelsolaar 6y ago
>This sounds about right for a company fraught with so many process problems lately Publicly the problems have been lately, but the things that caused these problems have happened much further back. I'm cautiously bullish on Intel. From what I gather, Intel is in a much better place internally. They have much better focus, there is less infighting, its more engineering then sales lead, they have some very good people and they are no longer complacent. It will however take years before this is becomes visible from the outside. Given the demand for CPUs and the competitions inability to deliver, I think intel will do OK even if they are no ones first choice of CPU vendor, while they try to catch up.
ksec 6y ago
It is certainly good enough to compete, prioritising Fab capacity to Server unit and lock in those important ( Swaying ) deals from clients. Sales and Marketing work their connection along with software tools that HPC markets needs and AFAIK is still far ahead of AMD. And I can bet those prices have lots of room for special discount to clients. Since RAM and NAND Storage dominate the cost of server, the difference of Intel and AMD shrinks rapidly in the grand scheme of things, giving Intel a chance to fight. And there is something not mentioned enough, the importance of PCI-E 4.0 Support. I wanted to rant about AMD, but I guess there is not much point. ARM is coming.

jvanderbot 6y ago

Furthermore: "At the end of the day, Ice Lake SP is a success. Performance is up, and performance per watt is up. I'm sure if we were able to test Intel's acceleration enhancements more thoroughly, we would be able to corroborate some of the results and hype that Intel wants to generate around its product. But even as a success, it’s not a traditional competitive success. The generational improvements are there and they are large, and as long as Intel is the market share leader, this should translate into upgraded systems and deployments throughout the enterprise industry. Intel is still in a tough competitive situation overall with the high quality the rest of the market is enabling."

jandrese 6y ago
I found it a little weird that they conclusions section didn't mention the AMD or ARM competition at all, given that the Intel chip seemed to be behind them in most of the tests.
- jvanderbot 6y ago
  You mean OP didn't? Yes, that's probably standard PR to focus on strengths rather than competition.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    I mean the Anand piece.
    - jvanderbot 6y ago
      The conclusions section was quoted in my post and they explicitly mention it. "As impressive as the new Xeon 8380 is from a generational and technical stand-point, what really matters at the end of the day is how it fares up to the competition. I’ll be blunt here; nobody really expected the new ICL-SP parts to beat AMD or the new Arm competition – and it didn’t. "

ajross 6y ago

I don't know that it's all so bad. The final takeaway is that a 660mm2 Intel die at 270W got about 70-80% of the performance that AMD's 1000mm2 MCM gets at 250W. So performance per transistor is similar, but per watt Intel lags. But then the idle draw was significantly better (AMD's idle power remains a problem across the Zen designs), so for many use cases it's probably a draw. That sounds "competetive enough" to me in the datacenter world, given the existing market lead Intel has.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
I would argue that for high-end servers, idle draw is a bit of a non-issue as presumably either you have only one of these machines and it’s sitting idle (so no matter how inefficient it doesn’t matter) or you have hundreds/thousands of them and they’ll be as far from idle as it’s possible to be. AMD’s idle power consumption is a bigger issue for desktop, laptop, and HEDT.
- ajross 6y ago
  Electricity costs for large datacenters are higher than the equipment costs. They absolutely care about idle draw.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    Shouldn't datacenters attempt to minimize idle time though? A server sitting at idle is a depreciating asset that could likely be put to more productive use if tasks were rescheduled to take advantage of idle time (this would also reduce the total number of servers needed).
    - gumby 6y ago
      That is definitely the objective but the reality is that load is not* uniform over the day. So you are paying to keep some number of servers hot (I don't know about spinup/spindown practices in modern datacenters). I doubt this applies to HPC (the target market for this part) as they either schedule jobs closely or could, I imagine, shut them down. But I'm not in that space either so this is merely conjecture. * I am sure there are corner cases where the load is uniform, but they are by definition few.

quelsolaar 6y ago

>This sounds about right for a company fraught with so many process problems lately Publicly the problems have been lately, but the things that caused these problems have happened much further back. I'm cautiously bullish on Intel. From what I gather, Intel is in a much better place internally. They have much better focus, there is less infighting, its more engineering then sales lead, they have some very good people and they are no longer complacent. It will however take years before this is becomes visible from the outside. Given the demand for CPUs and the competitions inability to deliver, I think intel will do OK even if they are no ones first choice of CPU vendor, while they try to catch up.

ksec 6y ago

It is certainly good enough to compete, prioritising Fab capacity to Server unit and lock in those important ( Swaying ) deals from clients. Sales and Marketing work their connection along with software tools that HPC markets needs and AFAIK is still far ahead of AMD. And I can bet those prices have lots of room for special discount to clients. Since RAM and NAND Storage dominate the cost of server, the difference of Intel and AMD shrinks rapidly in the grand scheme of things, giving Intel a chance to fight. And there is something not mentioned enough, the importance of PCI-E 4.0 Support. I wanted to rant about AMD, but I guess there is not much point. ARM is coming.