Not unexpected but a bad move. On package fabric was one of the few niche reasons to go with a Xeon SP build over the second generation Epyc chips. Now the list is down to three niche scenarios: quad/octo socket support, Optane DIMM support and on package FPGA. Support for AVX-512 is a plus for the Xeon line up but even then it isn't enough to win some benchmarks against the new Epyc chips. 2020 is going to be a very rough year for Intel.
Optane DIMM is also dead end tech. DDR4 memory prices have come down so much that it's now more expensive to equip a server with Optane memory than regular DIMMs
It's not byte addressable and also significantly more latency even with NVMe interconnect. SSD is a completely different storage tier. Also, you can't have DDR4 up to the capacity that Optane DIMMs provide. In database world this is significant.
You can buy NVDIMM for 4x the price of ECC RDIMM ( https://www.mouser.com/Embedded-Solutions/Memory-D... ) or 3x the cost of Optane, but it runs at full speed and works like regular memory (though the OS needs to know and support NVRDIMM when the UPS kicks in). If you have an in-memory database or anything that needs to be rebuilt after a reboot using persistent memory saves a LOT of downtime. It's not cost that is the concern, it's failure (or downtime) that is the cost.
I haven't found any benchmarks showing a quad socket Xeon system beating dual socket Epyc 7742 (which has 128 cores), so I'm not sure that quad socket support is a reason to buy Intel. Of course Intel has 8 socket systems as a niche where AMD doesn't have an equivalent offering.
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Kevin G - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
Not unexpected but a bad move. On package fabric was one of the few niche reasons to go with a Xeon SP build over the second generation Epyc chips. Now the list is down to three niche scenarios: quad/octo socket support, Optane DIMM support and on package FPGA. Support for AVX-512 is a plus for the Xeon line up but even then it isn't enough to win some benchmarks against the new Epyc chips. 2020 is going to be a very rough year for Intel.lefty2 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
Optane DIMM is also dead end tech. DDR4 memory prices have come down so much that it's now more expensive to equip a server with Optane memory than regular DIMMsJorgp2 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
But that's not persistent.GreenReaper - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
But it's a lot *more* expensive than persistent SSD, which is also available in much larger, easily-swappable units. See how that works?davej2019 - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link
It's not byte addressable and also significantly more latency even with NVMe interconnect. SSD is a completely different storage tier. Also, you can't have DDR4 up to the capacity that Optane DIMMs provide. In database world this is significant.tuxRoller - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
Or as dense.Rοb - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link
You can buy NVDIMM for 4x the price of ECC RDIMM ( https://www.mouser.com/Embedded-Solutions/Memory-D... ) or 3x the cost of Optane, but it runs at full speed and works like regular memory (though the OS needs to know and support NVRDIMM when the UPS kicks in). If you have an in-memory database or anything that needs to be rebuilt after a reboot using persistent memory saves a LOT of downtime. It's not cost that is the concern, it's failure (or downtime) that is the cost.KAlmquist - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link
I haven't found any benchmarks showing a quad socket Xeon system beating dual socket Epyc 7742 (which has 128 cores), so I'm not sure that quad socket support is a reason to buy Intel. Of course Intel has 8 socket systems as a niche where AMD doesn't have an equivalent offering.