6 ms·

Intel's latest flagship 128-core Xeon CPU costs $17,800

14 points by doener 2y ago

cebert 2y ago
> with support for up to 4.5TB of DDR4-2933 memory It is astonishing how much RAM modern systems can have. You could store many databases entirely in memory.
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  With that much RAM, that many cores and with a pile of NVMe storage, it's truly phenomenal how work one box can do (redundancy concerns aside.)
frankjr 2y ago
Maybe I'm missing something but why is the comparison table missing AMD Epyc 9684X (96/192) with a price of $14,756? Suddenly the price tag doesn't seem that outrages given the higher number of cores and performance gains. See benchmarks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-performance https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-performance
fragmede 2y ago
How much per hour do you suppose this'll cost on EC2?
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  Currently a c6i.32xlarge (128 core, 256 GB) is $5.44/hr, or up to $9.68/hr for an r6id.32xlarge with 1 TB of RAM and 4x1900 GB of NVMe. Of course, that's not even their biggest instance. For a whopping $109/hr, you can get a u-12tb1.112xlarge with 448 cores and 12 TB of RAM. I really have no idea what you would use that for. Machine learning with neural networks that would put OpenAI to shame?
  - ewzimm 2y ago
    $109/hr would be a cheap rate to hire a mechanic to work on a car, so the fact that anyone has access to that kind of compute for that price is pretty impressive!
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    It wouldn't take you long paying that rate to just buy an equivalent machine (even at MSRP).
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Reaching $20,000 at $100/hr is only a week, non-stop. I don't know what it looks like to want to use a machine like that for compute, but that makes the cloud look insanely expensive.
      - bigfatkitten 2y ago
        For the 448 core box you're looking at more like $60k, so that's a whole 3 weeks. People use the cloud for many things, but saving money on compute is never one of them.
will-burner 2y ago
Who buys chips like this and what are they used for? It's obviously important to push the cutting edge, and it's imaginable that someday a chip like this could be in a personal computer (over 100 cores and over 4TBs of memory!). The only things I can think, which I don't have experience with so I don't know if it's reasonable, would be high performance instances at data centers, supercomputing, and high performance main frames (is that a thing?).
- willcipriano 2y ago
  When you do colocation you often pay per rack unit. Fitting more cores into a server means you need less of them and can have a lower monthly bill.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > Who buys chips like this and what are they used for? I imagine cloud service providers would buy it. On a price/performance chart, you'd think you'd be better off buying consumer-grade Core i9 CPUs, or even i7, but that ignores everything else that must be bought, like a motherboard and RAM, and doesn't even account for the added rack space. Put 256 GB of RAM next to that CPU and AWS can host 64 c7i.large (2 core, 4 GB) instances for $64/month each, $4,096/month. They'd see RoI in under 5 months for the CPU. But really, this CPU is great for any embarrassingly parallel task that doesn't run well on a GPU.
- gomerspiles 2y ago
  Spending this much on a server's CPUs has been a pretty normal thing in DC/server rooms for a very long time, the rise of X86 in servers is a similar cheapening like the rise of ARM. It actually meant a lot of redesigning of applications to work with many entirely separate machines instead of the smallest large server that could cover the full load and maybe around an application process per core, all sharing direct access to the same storage, etc.
- m463 2y ago
  I would use it for make -j 256 I'll bet folks like Linus Torvalds would get reasonable time-savings with his kernel compiles.
JudasGoat 2y ago
Do the companies that buy these chips like this pay full price? I've always heard that volume buyers get deals we consumers aren't privy to.
- ksec 2y ago
  They don't. At least up to 5 - 6 years ago I doubt anything has changed. And these are not for consumer anyway.

14 points by doener 2y ago

> with support for up to 4.5TB of DDR4-2933 memory It is astonishing how much RAM modern systems can have. You could store many databases entirely in memory.

bigfatkitten 2y ago
With that much RAM, that many cores and with a pile of NVMe storage, it's truly phenomenal how work one box can do (redundancy concerns aside.)

frankjr 2y ago

Maybe I'm missing something but why is the comparison table missing AMD Epyc 9684X (96/192) with a price of $14,756? Suddenly the price tag doesn't seem that outrages given the higher number of cores and performance gains. See benchmarks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-performance https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-performance

fragmede 2y ago

How much per hour do you suppose this'll cost on EC2?

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
Currently a c6i.32xlarge (128 core, 256 GB) is $5.44/hr, or up to $9.68/hr for an r6id.32xlarge with 1 TB of RAM and 4x1900 GB of NVMe. Of course, that's not even their biggest instance. For a whopping $109/hr, you can get a u-12tb1.112xlarge with 448 cores and 12 TB of RAM. I really have no idea what you would use that for. Machine learning with neural networks that would put OpenAI to shame?
- ewzimm 2y ago
  $109/hr would be a cheap rate to hire a mechanic to work on a car, so the fact that anyone has access to that kind of compute for that price is pretty impressive!
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  It wouldn't take you long paying that rate to just buy an equivalent machine (even at MSRP).
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Reaching $20,000 at $100/hr is only a week, non-stop. I don't know what it looks like to want to use a machine like that for compute, but that makes the cloud look insanely expensive.
    - bigfatkitten 2y ago
      For the 448 core box you're looking at more like $60k, so that's a whole 3 weeks. People use the cloud for many things, but saving money on compute is never one of them.

will-burner 2y ago

Who buys chips like this and what are they used for? It's obviously important to push the cutting edge, and it's imaginable that someday a chip like this could be in a personal computer (over 100 cores and over 4TBs of memory!). The only things I can think, which I don't have experience with so I don't know if it's reasonable, would be high performance instances at data centers, supercomputing, and high performance main frames (is that a thing?).

willcipriano 2y ago
When you do colocation you often pay per rack unit. Fitting more cores into a server means you need less of them and can have a lower monthly bill.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> Who buys chips like this and what are they used for? I imagine cloud service providers would buy it. On a price/performance chart, you'd think you'd be better off buying consumer-grade Core i9 CPUs, or even i7, but that ignores everything else that must be bought, like a motherboard and RAM, and doesn't even account for the added rack space. Put 256 GB of RAM next to that CPU and AWS can host 64 c7i.large (2 core, 4 GB) instances for $64/month each, $4,096/month. They'd see RoI in under 5 months for the CPU. But really, this CPU is great for any embarrassingly parallel task that doesn't run well on a GPU.
gomerspiles 2y ago
Spending this much on a server's CPUs has been a pretty normal thing in DC/server rooms for a very long time, the rise of X86 in servers is a similar cheapening like the rise of ARM. It actually meant a lot of redesigning of applications to work with many entirely separate machines instead of the smallest large server that could cover the full load and maybe around an application process per core, all sharing direct access to the same storage, etc.
m463 2y ago
I would use it for make -j 256 I'll bet folks like Linus Torvalds would get reasonable time-savings with his kernel compiles.

JudasGoat 2y ago

Do the companies that buy these chips like this pay full price? I've always heard that volume buyers get deals we consumers aren't privy to.

ksec 2y ago
They don't. At least up to 5 - 6 years ago I doubt anything has changed. And these are not for consumer anyway.