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Jeff says as much. The AMD EPYC core does offer better performance per watt, which says more about AMD than it does about Ampere. But also this: "The big diff

Jeff says as much. The AMD EPYC core does offer better performance per watt, which says more about AMD than it does about Ampere. But also this: "The big difference is the AmpereOne A192-32X is $5,555, while the EPYC 9965 is almost $15,000!" So you have to look at TCO over a period of years, but that's still quite significant.

znpy 2y ago
> $5k vs $15k > So you have to look at TCO over a period of years, but that's still quite significant. Your point is a valid point. However if we're talking TCO, we should also factor in that TCO also does involve rack space, power (and power efficiency), cooling, cabling, ports on the ToR switch, so on and so forth. The AMD solution halves pretty much everything around the CPU, and in order to get the same thread count you should really compare 2x$5k vs $15k. I get that SMT does have performance hits, but such performance penalties mostly show up when you're doing number crunching all day every day. In real world scenarios, where software spends a lot of time waiting either for disk i/o or for network i/o I would expect that to be a non-issue. AMD's offering is still competitive, in my opinion.
magicalhippo 2y ago
Dad of a friend ran a store selling designer underwear for men. He sold boxer shorts for $70 over 25 years ago. He once told me that he also had a rack of thongs. Now, the thongs didn't have a lot of material, obviously, and were inexpensive to manufacture, so if he'd do his regular markup on them they'd end up selling for $15. "However, notice the price tag is $25. I add an extra $10, because if a guy's looking to buy a thong, he's going to buy a thong". I think about what he said when I see the chip prices on these high-end server CPUs.
touisteur 2y ago
Wondering who actually pays public price on those AMD chips in big-OEM servers. Not saying the AmpereOne isn't also discount-able too, but these public prices always feel like signalling, to me, more than a reference to the actual price. Or maybe I'm lucky...
incrudible 2y ago
The 9965 is a much faster chip than the Ampere, but also it is at the point of diminishing returns. The Ampere struggles to match much cheaper AMD offerings in the phoronix suite, it is not better value at all.

znpy 2y ago

> $5k vs $15k > So you have to look at TCO over a period of years, but that's still quite significant. Your point is a valid point. However if we're talking TCO, we should also factor in that TCO also does involve rack space, power (and power efficiency), cooling, cabling, ports on the ToR switch, so on and so forth. The AMD solution halves pretty much everything around the CPU, and in order to get the same thread count you should really compare 2x$5k vs $15k. I get that SMT does have performance hits, but such performance penalties mostly show up when you're doing number crunching all day every day. In real world scenarios, where software spends a lot of time waiting either for disk i/o or for network i/o I would expect that to be a non-issue. AMD's offering is still competitive, in my opinion.

magicalhippo 2y ago

Dad of a friend ran a store selling designer underwear for men. He sold boxer shorts for $70 over 25 years ago. He once told me that he also had a rack of thongs. Now, the thongs didn't have a lot of material, obviously, and were inexpensive to manufacture, so if he'd do his regular markup on them they'd end up selling for $15. "However, notice the price tag is $25. I add an extra $10, because if a guy's looking to buy a thong, he's going to buy a thong". I think about what he said when I see the chip prices on these high-end server CPUs.

touisteur 2y ago

Wondering who actually pays public price on those AMD chips in big-OEM servers. Not saying the AmpereOne isn't also discount-able too, but these public prices always feel like signalling, to me, more than a reference to the actual price. Or maybe I'm lucky...

incrudible 2y ago

The 9965 is a much faster chip than the Ampere, but also it is at the point of diminishing returns. The Ampere struggles to match much cheaper AMD offerings in the phoronix suite, it is not better value at all.