Granite Rapids is probably going win some of that back: a lot of the largest purchasers of x86 chips in the datacenter were buying Epycs because you could stuff more cores into a given amount of rack space than you could with Intel, but the Granite Rapids stuff has flipped that back the other way.
I’m sure AMD will respond with EVEN MORE CORES, and we’ll just flop around with however many cores you can stuff into $15,000 CPUs and thus who is outselling whom.
It’s not just performance, though. It’s also trust. If performance per watt was all that mattered, AMD would have cornered the server market years ago. Intel held on because they were considered rock solid stable–very important in a server. That trust was completely broken by the recent instability issues.
It’s not just cores - it is higher performance per rack unit while keeping power consumption and cooling needs the same.
That allows rack performance upgrades without expensive DC upgrades - and AMD has been killing dual and quad socket systems from intel with single and dual core epycs since launch now. Their 128 core one has a bit too high TDP, but just a bit lower core count and you can still run it in a rack configured for power and cooling needs from over a decade ago.
Granite rapids has too high TDP for that - you either go upgrade your DC, or lower performance per rack unit.
Granite Rapids is probably going win some of that back: a lot of the largest purchasers of x86 chips in the datacenter were buying Epycs because you could stuff more cores into a given amount of rack space than you could with Intel, but the Granite Rapids stuff has flipped that back the other way.
I’m sure AMD will respond with EVEN MORE CORES, and we’ll just flop around with however many cores you can stuff into $15,000 CPUs and thus who is outselling whom.
It’s not just performance, though. It’s also trust. If performance per watt was all that mattered, AMD would have cornered the server market years ago. Intel held on because they were considered rock solid stable–very important in a server. That trust was completely broken by the recent instability issues.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9754.html
Launched June of 2023
128c/256t
$11,900
400w TDP
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/240777/intel-xeon-6980p-processor-504m-cache-2-00-ghz/specifications.html
Launched Q3 of 2024
128c/256t
$17,800
500w TDP
I don’t think Granite Rapids are going to flip it back in Intels favor
It’s not just cores - it is higher performance per rack unit while keeping power consumption and cooling needs the same.
That allows rack performance upgrades without expensive DC upgrades - and AMD has been killing dual and quad socket systems from intel with single and dual core epycs since launch now. Their 128 core one has a bit too high TDP, but just a bit lower core count and you can still run it in a rack configured for power and cooling needs from over a decade ago.
Granite rapids has too high TDP for that - you either go upgrade your DC, or lower performance per rack unit.