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I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is ther

by tw04 5y ago

I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstation" feature, here's an identical xeon with nothing new other than ECC! Just STOP. EVERY CPU they make should support ECC in 2021. Give me an option for with or without GPU, and with or without 10Gbe - everything else should be standard. Differentiate with clock speed, core count, and a low power option, and be done with it.

KronisLV 5y ago
I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. After all, making your consumers buy the more expensive versions of your product just because they need one of its features is a sound business decision. Otherwise people will use the cheaper and lower end versions if they only need these features - like i'm currently using 200GEs for my homelab servers, because i do not require any additional functionality that the low power 2018 chip doesn't provide.
- awestroke 5y ago
  Well, now they are losing to AMD, so what does that tell you about it being a sound busineas decision?
  - apetrovic 5y ago
    They aren't losing to AMD because of market segmentation, they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Hence they can no longer afford to do the market segmentation.
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      > they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC. I don't believe it is merely an execution problem. AMD's out-innovated Intel Evidence being the pivot to multi-core, massive increased PCIe, better fabric, chiplet design, design efficiency per wafter, among others. Why did this happen? > Two years after Keller's restoration in AMD's R&D section, CEO Rory Read stepped down and the SVP/GM moved up. With a doctorate in electronic engineering from MIT and having conducted research into SOI (silicon-on-insulator) MOSFETS, Lisa Su [1] had the academic background and the industrial experience needed to return AMD to its glory days. But nothing happens overnight in the world of large scale processors -- chip designs take several years, at best, before they are ready for market. AMD would have to ride the storm until such plans could come to fruition. >While AMD continued to struggle, Intel went from strength to strength. The Core architecture and fabrication process nodes had matured nicely, and at the end of 2016, they posted a revenue of almost $60 billion. For a number of years, Intel had been following a 'tick-tock' approach to processor development: a 'tick' would be a new architecture, whereas a 'tock' would be a process refinement, typically in the form of a smaller node. >However, not all was well behind the scenes, despite the huge profits and near-total market dominance. In 2012, Intel expected to be releasing CPUs on a cutting-edge 10nm node within 3 years. That particular tock never happened -- indeed, the clock never really ticked, either. Their first 14nm CPU, using the Broadwell architecture, appeared in 2015 and the node and fundamental design remained in place for half a decade. >The engineers at the foundries repeatedly hit yield issues with 10nm, forcing Intel to refine the older process and architecture each year. Clock speeds and power consumption climbed ever higher, but no new designs were forthcoming; an echo, perhaps, of their Netburst days. PC customers were left with frustrating choices: choose something from the powerful Core line, but pay a hefty price, or choose the weaker and cheaper FX/A-series. >But AMD had been quietly building a winning set of cards and played their hand in February 2016, at the annual E3 event. Using the eagerly awaited Doom reboot as the announcement platform, the completely new Zen architecture was revealed to the public. Very little was said about the fresh design besides phrases such as 'simultaneous multithreading', 'high bandwidth cache,' and 'energy efficient finFET design.' More details were given during Computex 2016, including a target of a 40% improvement over the Excavator architecture. .... >Zen took the best from all previous designs and melded them into a structure that focused on keeping the pipelines as busy as possible; and to do this, required significant improvements to the pipeline and cache systems. The new design dropped the sharing of L1/L2 caches, as used in Bulldozer, and each core was now fully independent, with more pipelines, better branch prediction, and greater cache bandwidth. ... >In the space of six months, AMD showed that they were effectively targeting every x86 desktop market possible, with a single, one-size-fits-all design. A year later, the architecture was updated to Zen+, which consisted of tweaks in the cache system and switching from GlobalFoundries' venerable 14LPP process -- a node that was under from Samsung -- to an updated, denser 12LP system. The CPU dies remained the same size, but the new fabrication method allowed the processors to run at higher clock speeds. >Another 12 months after that, in the summer of 2019, AMD launched Zen 2. This time the changes were more significant and the term chiplet became all the rage. Rather than following a monolithic construction, where every part of the CPU is in the same piece of silicon (which Zen and Zen+ do), the engineers separated in the Core Complexes from the interconnect system. The former were built by TSMC, using their N7 process, becoming full dies in their own right -- hence the name, Core Complex Die (CCD). The input/output structure was made by GlobalFoundries, with desktop Ryzen models using a 12LP chip, and Threadripper & EPYC sporting larger 14 nm versions. ... >It's worth taking stock with what AMD achieved with Zen. In the space of 8 years, the architecture went from a blank sheet of paper to a comprehensive portfolio of products, containing $99 4-core, 8-thread budget offerings through to $4,000+ 64-core, 128-thread server CPUs. From https://www.techspot.com/article/2043-amd-rise-fall-revival-history/ https://www.techspot.com/article/2043-amd-rise-fall-revival-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      They are. The Intel segmentation was too restrictive. AMD started offering "server" grade features on desktop parts.
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    Exactly. It seemed like a sound business decision because it gave them measurably more money in their pocket over a short period of time. They don't appear to have taken into account that they left the door open for competition. It wasn't just prices that left them vulnerable, but it sure didn't help. AMD should never have been able to get back in the game.
- CountSessine 5y ago
  I agree but this is a game you can play with your customers when they actually want what you’re selling and you have market power. When you’re losing ground and customers are leaving the shop, it’s time to cut the bullshit and give people what they want.
- tw04 5y ago
  >I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. The only reason it hasn't happened is because they had no legitimate competition until recently. In a healthy market they would have been forced to do so long ago. Capitalism and "market forces" only work where competition exists.
xuki 5y ago
Yeah, I've switched to AMD Ryzen 5k for my dedicated servers. They're faster and cheaper than Xeon, they support ECC which is the only reasons I need Xeon previously.
- polskibus 5y ago
  Higher end Ryzens along with NVMe make for great high performance CI local worker nodes.
blackhaz 5y ago
Business features are tied to software/hardware features. They want piece of your business.
freemint 5y ago
I don't want to pay more for cheap CPUs such that they have ECC. High prices on ECC subsidize cheaper parts without ECC.
- magila 5y ago
  In theory Intel could use profits from Xeons to subsidize consumer chips, but I doubt they actually are. In practice you only see that happen in highly competitive commodity markets where the profit margin on consumer grade models is razor thin (e.g. SSDs). Intel's profit margin on their consumer chips is not particularly small, and AMD wasn't a significant competitive threat until a year or two ago.
- mook 5y ago
  Except that if the cheaper chips have ECC, they probably couldn't go up much in price — that price is limited by how much people (who don't care about ECC anyway) are willing to pay. So if prices for the low end went up, people (like you) would instead go without (meaning Intel doesn't get your money), or try to get second hand (Intel doesn't get your money), or go with AMD (Intel doesn't get your money). But Intel would really like to have your money, or at least generally more money.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Intel would like to make the same profit per wafer as before. Any savings you get as some who wants ECC gets added weighted by fraction of volumes to chips in my price class. No thanks.
Consultant32452 5y ago
This is very common across many industries. It doesn't cost much more to manufacture a sports car vs a sedan, but the price is very different. No product is based on the price of manufacture, it's based on the price people are willing to pay.
- hajile 5y ago
  Let’s say it costs 5 billion to design a car (it goes as high as 6 billion) and another 2-3 billion to create all the molds and custom tooling and change over a factory. If you sell 10 million cars, that overhead costs $800 per car. If you sell only 1 million, that’s $8,000 per car. Some sports cars sell even fewer units than that. This is the biggest reason prices are higher.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
colejohnson66 5y ago
It’s worth keeping in mind that the silicon lottery is very much a thing at these nanometer sizes. So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate. By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmentation? No. They almost certainly disable, for example, hyperthreading on cores that support it - just for the segmentation. But we can’t make every CPU support everything without wasting half good dies.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense. Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged. Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.
  - dev_tty01 5y ago
    Amoral? Why? They advertise a two core part, you pay for a two core part, you get a two core part. Completely fair.
    - hnuser123456 5y ago
      Because if they're capable of making plenty of good 4-cores but have more demand for 2-cores so are cutting good 4c, they should just make the 4-cores a little cheaper. But maybe they already do this. Anyways, agreed ECC should be standard, but it requires an extra die and most people can do fine without it, so it probably won't happen. But an ECC CPU option with clearly marketed consumer full ECC RAM would be nice. DDR5 is a nice step in this direction but isn't "full" ECC.
      - dageshi 5y ago
        I don't know if mobile cores factor into the same process, but if you have a lot of demand for 2 core system for cheap laptops that can't supply the power or cooling for a 4 core then having more 4 cores, even if they're cheaper doesn't help.
xyzzy21 5y ago
The "reason" is yield management combined with inventory management. The i3 through i9 are generally the exact same silicon. But yields are always variable. If you took the raw yield the actual i9 per wafer might only be 10%-20% which would not be economically viable. So designed into EVERY Intel product (and generally every other semiconductor company's products) are "fuses" and circuitry that can re-map and re-program out failed elements of the product die. So a failed i9 can AND DOES become i7, i5, or i3. There is no native i3 processor. The i3 is merely an i9 that has 6 failed cores or 6 "canceled" cores (for inventory/market supply management). Same goes for i5 and i7. They are "semi-failed" i9s! This is how the industry works. Memories work in similar ways for Flash or DRAM: there is a top-end product which is designed with either spare rows or columns as well as half-array and 3/4-array map-out fuses. Further there is speed binning with a premium on EMPIRICALLY faster parts (you can NOT predict or control all to be fast - it's a Bell curve distribution like most EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe) With this, nominal total yields can be in the 90% range. Without it, pretty much NO processor or memory chip would be economically viable. The segmentation is as much created to support this reality OF PHYSICS and ENGINEERING as it is to maximize profits. So generally, to use your example, a non-ECC processor is a regular processor "who's" ECC logic has failed and is inoperable. Similar for different cache size versions - part of the cache memory array has failed on smaller cache parts. So rather than trash the entire die which earns $0 (and actually costs money to trash), it has some fuses blown, gets packaged and becomes a non-ECC processor which for the right customer is 100% OK so that it earns something less than the ECC version but at an acceptable discount. When I worked at Intel, we had Commercial, Industrial and Military environmental plus extra ones for "emergencies: e.g. parts that completed 80% of military qual and then failed - hence the "Express" class part. We also had 10 ns speed bins which create 5-7 bins, and then the failed half- and quarter-array parts meant 3 more. So 4x7x3 = 84 possible product just for the memory parts I worked on. For processors you could easily have separate categories for core failures, for ECC failures, for FPU/CPU failures. That takes you up to 100-200 easy. If you are simultaneous selling 2-3 technology generations (tik-tock or tik-tik-tock), that gets you to 500-1000 easy. This is about "portfolio effect" to maximize profits while still living with the harsh realities that the laws of physics impose upon semiconductor manufacturing. You don't rely on a single version and you don't toss out imperfect parts. BTW how do you think IPA and sour beers came about?? Because of market research? Or because someone had a whole lot of Epic Fail beer brew that they needed to get rid of?? It was the latter originally, plus inspired marketing. And then people realized they could intentionally sell schlock made with looser process controls and make even more money!
wyager 5y ago
> Give me an option for with or without GPU, and with or without 10Gbe In what capacity is 10Gbe included as a CPU feature? I’ve only ever used PCIe cards.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  so these days 10GbPCIe and 10gbe are essentially the same thing at the low level silicon/pins/wires level the bit packing/unpacking/signalling stuff has a whole lot in common and they're all sort of converging on some superset of hardware serdes - the higher level hardware stuff is still different (ethernet MACs vs PCI etc) of course
billsnow 5y ago
ECC support is an actual +10-20% cost in materials for the motherboard and DIMM manufacturers. Also, ECC errors are basically non-existent on desktop/laptop workloads. ECC is worth the extra cost in servers, but for desktops and laptops, the market got it right.
- s1dev 5y ago
  A consumer PC should see a single bit error roughly once a week. That’s hardly non-existent
  - Filligree 5y ago
    Worst case those just trash some family photos of a dead relative. Hardly anything important. /s
  - billsnow 5y ago
    According to who? I checked the edac module for a year on my work machine, and it never detected a single error. I know I'm just one anecdote, but I doubt I'm that lucky.
    - s1dev 5y ago
      Here's a few references https://doi.org/10.1145/2492101.1555372 https://doi.org/10.1145/2492101.1555372 https://doi.org/10.1145/2786763.2694348 https://doi.org/10.1145/2786763.2694348 https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2015.57 https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2015.57
formerly_proven 5y ago
Fun-fact: Intel's 12th gen desktop CPUs will no longer have AVX-512. Well, I mean, the cores do have it, but it's disabled in all SKUs. So to do any AVX-512 development and testing at all you will need an Intel Xeon machine in the future.
babypuncher 5y ago
Market segmentation both raises and lowers prices. I don't think it is inherently bad. The low cost of entry level chips is only viable because of the high cost of premium chips. It is also critical in getting more viable chips out of your wafers, as defective parts of the silicon can be disabled and the chip placed in a lower SKU. If you eliminate the market segmentation practices, then the price of the small number of remaining SKUs will regress to the mean. This may save wealthy buyers money as they get more features for less cash, but poor buyers get left out completely as they can no longer afford anything. I do agree that Intel takes this to an absurd degree and should reign it in to a level more comparable to AMD. With ECC being mandatory in DDR5, I would expect all Intel chips to support it within a few years.
deckard1 5y ago
Just to note, AMD does every single thing you blame Intel for. AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a year after they put it out. Also, Ryzen APU CPUs do not support ECC. Only the PRO branded versions. Which only exist as A) OEM laptop integration chips, or B) OEM desktop chips which can only be found outside North America (think AliExpress, or random sellers on eBay). It's more accurate to say AsRock supports ECC on Ryzen. And sometimes Asus. They are also incredibly cagey about exactly what level of ECC they support. Ryzen only supports UDIMMs. Not the cheaper RDIMMs. There are literally 2-3 models of 32GB ECC UDIMMs on the market. One of which is still labeled "prototype" on Micron's website, last I checked. Even if your CPU supports ECC, it takes the entire market to bring it to fruition. If no one is buying ECC (because non ECC will always be cheaper), then the market for those chips and motherboards won't exist. Want IPMI on Ryzen? You're stuck with AsRock Rack or Asus Pro WS X570-ACE. Go check the prices on those. Factor in the UDIMM ECC. It's not cheaper than Xeon. [1] https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-motherboard-makers-offering-ryzen-5000-desktop-cpu-bios-support-on-am4-x370/ https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-motherboard-makers-offering-r...
- officeplant 5y ago
  >OEM desktop chips which can only be found outside North America (think AliExpress, or random sellers on eBay). Lenovo offered Pro Series Ryzen APU small form factor PCs. Like the Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q with a 2400GE. I believe HP offered them as well with the 2400GE at some point.
  - deckard1 5y ago
    by desktop I meant non-integrated/embedded. A standalone CPU you could buy and plop into any standard ATX/mATX/ITX motherboard. But even if you have a Pro embedded, it doesn't mean you get ECC. My Lenovo ThinkPad has a PRO 4750U. But they solder on one non-ECC DIMM. So it's rather pointless. Plus, it's SODIMM. So that's yet another factor at play when choosing RAM. The only real exception that I know of is the recent 5000G APUs may support ECC. But this seems to be borderline rumor/speculation at this point. Level1Techs made the claim on YouTube and were supposed to have a follow up. Not sure if that ever happened.
antonios 5y ago
Yes please. ECC support by now should come by default, both in CPU support and in motherboards, RAM chips etc. At least AMD Ryzen supports it, but the fact that one has to spend a lot of time to research through products, specs, forums and internet chats to figure out a good CPU, m/b & RAM combination that works is cumbersome, to say the least.
omegalulw 5y ago
While I agree with your general sentiment, I don't agree that you should expect Intel to hand out features for free. That's what competition is for.
phendrenad2 5y ago
The more expensive chips subsidize the cheaper ones. If they put ECC in low-end models, they would have to charge more for them, because fewer people would buy the high-end models. Also, there's some cross contamination between price point and market segment here. Nobody just buys a CPU, they buy a CPU wrapped in a laptop. So Intel's real customers are laptop manufacturers, not you. So the low-end chips have to appeal to a model that the laptop vendors want to introduce. That takes the form of thin & light laptops (or low-energy-usage "green" desktops for office workers). Adding ECC support adds heat and cost and die size. All things the thin & light market do not want under any circumstances.
drewg123 5y ago
And similarly with memory speed segmentation in the Xeon line. I'm kicking the tires on a ice lake 8352V, and I was disappointed (but not at all surprised) to learn that it is running its 3200 memory at 2933
tails4e 5y ago
It is a bit much that ECC is only availble on xeons, as ecc is incredibly cheap in terms of circuitry. Glad to see AMD are including it on mid end products.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by tw04 5y ago

KronisLV 5y ago

I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. After all, making your consumers buy the more expensive versions of your product just because they need one of its features is a sound business decision. Otherwise people will use the cheaper and lower end versions if they only need these features - like i'm currently using 200GEs for my homelab servers, because i do not require any additional functionality that the low power 2018 chip doesn't provide.

awestroke 5y ago
Well, now they are losing to AMD, so what does that tell you about it being a sound busineas decision?
- apetrovic 5y ago
  They aren't losing to AMD because of market segmentation, they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Hence they can no longer afford to do the market segmentation.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    > they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC. I don't believe it is merely an execution problem. AMD's out-innovated Intel Evidence being the pivot to multi-core, massive increased PCIe, better fabric, chiplet design, design efficiency per wafter, among others. Why did this happen? > Two years after Keller's restoration in AMD's R&D section, CEO Rory Read stepped down and the SVP/GM moved up. With a doctorate in electronic engineering from MIT and having conducted research into SOI (silicon-on-insulator) MOSFETS, Lisa Su [1] had the academic background and the industrial experience needed to return AMD to its glory days. But nothing happens overnight in the world of large scale processors -- chip designs take several years, at best, before they are ready for market. AMD would have to ride the storm until such plans could come to fruition. >While AMD continued to struggle, Intel went from strength to strength. The Core architecture and fabrication process nodes had matured nicely, and at the end of 2016, they posted a revenue of almost $60 billion. For a number of years, Intel had been following a 'tick-tock' approach to processor development: a 'tick' would be a new architecture, whereas a 'tock' would be a process refinement, typically in the form of a smaller node. >However, not all was well behind the scenes, despite the huge profits and near-total market dominance. In 2012, Intel expected to be releasing CPUs on a cutting-edge 10nm node within 3 years. That particular tock never happened -- indeed, the clock never really ticked, either. Their first 14nm CPU, using the Broadwell architecture, appeared in 2015 and the node and fundamental design remained in place for half a decade. >The engineers at the foundries repeatedly hit yield issues with 10nm, forcing Intel to refine the older process and architecture each year. Clock speeds and power consumption climbed ever higher, but no new designs were forthcoming; an echo, perhaps, of their Netburst days. PC customers were left with frustrating choices: choose something from the powerful Core line, but pay a hefty price, or choose the weaker and cheaper FX/A-series. >But AMD had been quietly building a winning set of cards and played their hand in February 2016, at the annual E3 event. Using the eagerly awaited Doom reboot as the announcement platform, the completely new Zen architecture was revealed to the public. Very little was said about the fresh design besides phrases such as 'simultaneous multithreading', 'high bandwidth cache,' and 'energy efficient finFET design.' More details were given during Computex 2016, including a target of a 40% improvement over the Excavator architecture. .... >Zen took the best from all previous designs and melded them into a structure that focused on keeping the pipelines as busy as possible; and to do this, required significant improvements to the pipeline and cache systems. The new design dropped the sharing of L1/L2 caches, as used in Bulldozer, and each core was now fully independent, with more pipelines, better branch prediction, and greater cache bandwidth. ... >In the space of six months, AMD showed that they were effectively targeting every x86 desktop market possible, with a single, one-size-fits-all design. A year later, the architecture was updated to Zen+, which consisted of tweaks in the cache system and switching from GlobalFoundries' venerable 14LPP process -- a node that was under from Samsung -- to an updated, denser 12LP system. The CPU dies remained the same size, but the new fabrication method allowed the processors to run at higher clock speeds. >Another 12 months after that, in the summer of 2019, AMD launched Zen 2. This time the changes were more significant and the term chiplet became all the rage. Rather than following a monolithic construction, where every part of the CPU is in the same piece of silicon (which Zen and Zen+ do), the engineers separated in the Core Complexes from the interconnect system. The former were built by TSMC, using their N7 process, becoming full dies in their own right -- hence the name, Core Complex Die (CCD). The input/output structure was made by GlobalFoundries, with desktop Ryzen models using a 12LP chip, and Threadripper & EPYC sporting larger 14 nm versions. ... >It's worth taking stock with what AMD achieved with Zen. In the space of 8 years, the architecture went from a blank sheet of paper to a comprehensive portfolio of products, containing $99 4-core, 8-thread budget offerings through to $4,000+ 64-core, 128-thread server CPUs. From https://www.techspot.com/article/2043-amd-rise-fall-revival-history/ https://www.techspot.com/article/2043-amd-rise-fall-revival-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Su
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    They are. The Intel segmentation was too restrictive. AMD started offering "server" grade features on desktop parts.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Exactly. It seemed like a sound business decision because it gave them measurably more money in their pocket over a short period of time. They don't appear to have taken into account that they left the door open for competition. It wasn't just prices that left them vulnerable, but it sure didn't help. AMD should never have been able to get back in the game.
CountSessine 5y ago
I agree but this is a game you can play with your customers when they actually want what you’re selling and you have market power. When you’re losing ground and customers are leaving the shop, it’s time to cut the bullshit and give people what they want.
tw04 5y ago
>I agree in principle, but it's pretty obvious that this would be bad for their profit margins and as a consequence wouldn't happen. The only reason it hasn't happened is because they had no legitimate competition until recently. In a healthy market they would have been forced to do so long ago. Capitalism and "market forces" only work where competition exists.

xuki 5y ago

Yeah, I've switched to AMD Ryzen 5k for my dedicated servers. They're faster and cheaper than Xeon, they support ECC which is the only reasons I need Xeon previously.

polskibus 5y ago
Higher end Ryzens along with NVMe make for great high performance CI local worker nodes.

blackhaz 5y ago

Business features are tied to software/hardware features. They want piece of your business.

freemint 5y ago

I don't want to pay more for cheap CPUs such that they have ECC. High prices on ECC subsidize cheaper parts without ECC.

magila 5y ago
In theory Intel could use profits from Xeons to subsidize consumer chips, but I doubt they actually are. In practice you only see that happen in highly competitive commodity markets where the profit margin on consumer grade models is razor thin (e.g. SSDs). Intel's profit margin on their consumer chips is not particularly small, and AMD wasn't a significant competitive threat until a year or two ago.
mook 5y ago
Except that if the cheaper chips have ECC, they probably couldn't go up much in price — that price is limited by how much people (who don't care about ECC anyway) are willing to pay. So if prices for the low end went up, people (like you) would instead go without (meaning Intel doesn't get your money), or try to get second hand (Intel doesn't get your money), or go with AMD (Intel doesn't get your money). But Intel would really like to have your money, or at least generally more money.
- freemint 5y ago
  Intel would like to make the same profit per wafer as before. Any savings you get as some who wants ECC gets added weighted by fraction of volumes to chips in my price class. No thanks.

Consultant32452 5y ago

This is very common across many industries. It doesn't cost much more to manufacture a sports car vs a sedan, but the price is very different. No product is based on the price of manufacture, it's based on the price people are willing to pay.

hajile 5y ago
Let’s say it costs 5 billion to design a car (it goes as high as 6 billion) and another 2-3 billion to create all the molds and custom tooling and change over a factory. If you sell 10 million cars, that overhead costs $800 per car. If you sell only 1 million, that’s $8,000 per car. Some sports cars sell even fewer units than that. This is the biggest reason prices are higher.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

colejohnson66 5y ago

It’s worth keeping in mind that the silicon lottery is very much a thing at these nanometer sizes. So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate. By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmentation? No. They almost certainly disable, for example, hyperthreading on cores that support it - just for the segmentation. But we can’t make every CPU support everything without wasting half good dies.

inetknght 5y ago
> By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense. Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged. Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  Amoral? Why? They advertise a two core part, you pay for a two core part, you get a two core part. Completely fair.
  - hnuser123456 5y ago
    Because if they're capable of making plenty of good 4-cores but have more demand for 2-cores so are cutting good 4c, they should just make the 4-cores a little cheaper. But maybe they already do this. Anyways, agreed ECC should be standard, but it requires an extra die and most people can do fine without it, so it probably won't happen. But an ECC CPU option with clearly marketed consumer full ECC RAM would be nice. DDR5 is a nice step in this direction but isn't "full" ECC.
    - dageshi 5y ago
      I don't know if mobile cores factor into the same process, but if you have a lot of demand for 2 core system for cheap laptops that can't supply the power or cooling for a 4 core then having more 4 cores, even if they're cheaper doesn't help.

xyzzy21 5y ago

The "reason" is yield management combined with inventory management. The i3 through i9 are generally the exact same silicon. But yields are always variable. If you took the raw yield the actual i9 per wafer might only be 10%-20% which would not be economically viable. So designed into EVERY Intel product (and generally every other semiconductor company's products) are "fuses" and circuitry that can re-map and re-program out failed elements of the product die. So a failed i9 can AND DOES become i7, i5, or i3. There is no native i3 processor. The i3 is merely an i9 that has 6 failed cores or 6 "canceled" cores (for inventory/market supply management). Same goes for i5 and i7. They are "semi-failed" i9s! This is how the industry works. Memories work in similar ways for Flash or DRAM: there is a top-end product which is designed with either spare rows or columns as well as half-array and 3/4-array map-out fuses. Further there is speed binning with a premium on EMPIRICALLY faster parts (you can NOT predict or control all to be fast - it's a Bell curve distribution like most EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe) With this, nominal total yields can be in the 90% range. Without it, pretty much NO processor or memory chip would be economically viable. The segmentation is as much created to support this reality OF PHYSICS and ENGINEERING as it is to maximize profits. So generally, to use your example, a non-ECC processor is a regular processor "who's" ECC logic has failed and is inoperable. Similar for different cache size versions - part of the cache memory array has failed on smaller cache parts. So rather than trash the entire die which earns $0 (and actually costs money to trash), it has some fuses blown, gets packaged and becomes a non-ECC processor which for the right customer is 100% OK so that it earns something less than the ECC version but at an acceptable discount. When I worked at Intel, we had Commercial, Industrial and Military environmental plus extra ones for "emergencies: e.g. parts that completed 80% of military qual and then failed - hence the "Express" class part. We also had 10 ns speed bins which create 5-7 bins, and then the failed half- and quarter-array parts meant 3 more. So 4x7x3 = 84 possible product just for the memory parts I worked on. For processors you could easily have separate categories for core failures, for ECC failures, for FPU/CPU failures. That takes you up to 100-200 easy. If you are simultaneous selling 2-3 technology generations (tik-tock or tik-tik-tock), that gets you to 500-1000 easy. This is about "portfolio effect" to maximize profits while still living with the harsh realities that the laws of physics impose upon semiconductor manufacturing. You don't rely on a single version and you don't toss out imperfect parts. BTW how do you think IPA and sour beers came about?? Because of market research? Or because someone had a whole lot of Epic Fail beer brew that they needed to get rid of?? It was the latter originally, plus inspired marketing. And then people realized they could intentionally sell schlock made with looser process controls and make even more money!

wyager 5y ago

> Give me an option for with or without GPU, and with or without 10Gbe In what capacity is 10Gbe included as a CPU feature? I’ve only ever used PCIe cards.

Taniwha 5y ago
so these days 10GbPCIe and 10gbe are essentially the same thing at the low level silicon/pins/wires level the bit packing/unpacking/signalling stuff has a whole lot in common and they're all sort of converging on some superset of hardware serdes - the higher level hardware stuff is still different (ethernet MACs vs PCI etc) of course

billsnow 5y ago

ECC support is an actual +10-20% cost in materials for the motherboard and DIMM manufacturers. Also, ECC errors are basically non-existent on desktop/laptop workloads. ECC is worth the extra cost in servers, but for desktops and laptops, the market got it right.

s1dev 5y ago
A consumer PC should see a single bit error roughly once a week. That’s hardly non-existent
- Filligree 5y ago
  Worst case those just trash some family photos of a dead relative. Hardly anything important. /s
- billsnow 5y ago
  According to who? I checked the edac module for a year on my work machine, and it never detected a single error. I know I'm just one anecdote, but I doubt I'm that lucky.
  - s1dev 5y ago
    Here's a few references https://doi.org/10.1145/2492101.1555372 https://doi.org/10.1145/2492101.1555372 https://doi.org/10.1145/2786763.2694348 https://doi.org/10.1145/2786763.2694348 https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2015.57 https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2015.57

formerly_proven 5y ago

Fun-fact: Intel's 12th gen desktop CPUs will no longer have AVX-512. Well, I mean, the cores do have it, but it's disabled in all SKUs. So to do any AVX-512 development and testing at all you will need an Intel Xeon machine in the future.

babypuncher 5y ago

Market segmentation both raises and lowers prices. I don't think it is inherently bad. The low cost of entry level chips is only viable because of the high cost of premium chips. It is also critical in getting more viable chips out of your wafers, as defective parts of the silicon can be disabled and the chip placed in a lower SKU. If you eliminate the market segmentation practices, then the price of the small number of remaining SKUs will regress to the mean. This may save wealthy buyers money as they get more features for less cash, but poor buyers get left out completely as they can no longer afford anything. I do agree that Intel takes this to an absurd degree and should reign it in to a level more comparable to AMD. With ECC being mandatory in DDR5, I would expect all Intel chips to support it within a few years.

deckard1 5y ago

Just to note, AMD does every single thing you blame Intel for. AMD recently dicked b350/x370 chipset owners by sending motherboard manufacturers a memo telling them not to support Zen 3 (5000 series) Ryzen CPUs on their older chipsets.[1] This was after AsRock sent out a beta BIOS which proved that 5000 series CPUs worked fine on b350 chipsets. Today, AsRock's beta BIOS still isn't on their website and it's nearly a year after they put it out. Also, Ryzen APU CPUs do not support ECC. Only the PRO branded versions. Which only exist as A) OEM laptop integration chips, or B) OEM desktop chips which can only be found outside North America (think AliExpress, or random sellers on eBay). It's more accurate to say AsRock supports ECC on Ryzen. And sometimes Asus. They are also incredibly cagey about exactly what level of ECC they support. Ryzen only supports UDIMMs. Not the cheaper RDIMMs. There are literally 2-3 models of 32GB ECC UDIMMs on the market. One of which is still labeled "prototype" on Micron's website, last I checked. Even if your CPU supports ECC, it takes the entire market to bring it to fruition. If no one is buying ECC (because non ECC will always be cheaper), then the market for those chips and motherboards won't exist. Want IPMI on Ryzen? You're stuck with AsRock Rack or Asus Pro WS X570-ACE. Go check the prices on those. Factor in the UDIMM ECC. It's not cheaper than Xeon. [1] https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-motherboard-makers-offering-ryzen-5000-desktop-cpu-bios-support-on-am4-x370/ https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-motherboard-makers-offering-r...

officeplant 5y ago
>OEM desktop chips which can only be found outside North America (think AliExpress, or random sellers on eBay). Lenovo offered Pro Series Ryzen APU small form factor PCs. Like the Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q with a 2400GE. I believe HP offered them as well with the 2400GE at some point.
- deckard1 5y ago
  by desktop I meant non-integrated/embedded. A standalone CPU you could buy and plop into any standard ATX/mATX/ITX motherboard. But even if you have a Pro embedded, it doesn't mean you get ECC. My Lenovo ThinkPad has a PRO 4750U. But they solder on one non-ECC DIMM. So it's rather pointless. Plus, it's SODIMM. So that's yet another factor at play when choosing RAM. The only real exception that I know of is the recent 5000G APUs may support ECC. But this seems to be borderline rumor/speculation at this point. Level1Techs made the claim on YouTube and were supposed to have a follow up. Not sure if that ever happened.

antonios 5y ago

Yes please. ECC support by now should come by default, both in CPU support and in motherboards, RAM chips etc. At least AMD Ryzen supports it, but the fact that one has to spend a lot of time to research through products, specs, forums and internet chats to figure out a good CPU, m/b & RAM combination that works is cumbersome, to say the least.

omegalulw 5y ago

While I agree with your general sentiment, I don't agree that you should expect Intel to hand out features for free. That's what competition is for.

phendrenad2 5y ago

The more expensive chips subsidize the cheaper ones. If they put ECC in low-end models, they would have to charge more for them, because fewer people would buy the high-end models. Also, there's some cross contamination between price point and market segment here. Nobody just buys a CPU, they buy a CPU wrapped in a laptop. So Intel's real customers are laptop manufacturers, not you. So the low-end chips have to appeal to a model that the laptop vendors want to introduce. That takes the form of thin & light laptops (or low-energy-usage "green" desktops for office workers). Adding ECC support adds heat and cost and die size. All things the thin & light market do not want under any circumstances.

drewg123 5y ago

And similarly with memory speed segmentation in the Xeon line. I'm kicking the tires on a ice lake 8352V, and I was disappointed (but not at all surprised) to learn that it is running its 3200 memory at 2933

tails4e 5y ago

It is a bit much that ECC is only availble on xeons, as ecc is incredibly cheap in terms of circuitry. Glad to see AMD are including it on mid end products.

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