I think some high-core count multiple-chiplet processors will be used to replace older scale-up systems. Currently eight-socket Lenovo x3950 X6 servers are selling for much less than $1000 on eBay.
In my opinion these older 8-socket servers have interesting performance characteristics and make an interesting point of comparison for the new machines.
Thanks Chester, another great deep dive! Appreciate also the inclusion of the Graviton CPU instances, as Hyperscalers like AWS deploy more and more ARM-based servers. Question more related to the AWS rentals: what were (roughly) the relative expenses ( rentals) for the Xeons, the EPYC and AWS's own Graviton at comparable compute capabilities?
And, did you or George hear anything new about the status of the next generation Xeons? I believe it'll be critical for Intel to deliver both Panther Lake for notebooks and the next "Rapid" in 18 Angstrom in the next 6-9 months.
I didn't hear anything besides about Clearwater Forest (288 E-Cores), but I also don't keep up with the rumor mill. Logically they would want to put Lion Cove on the server side, with AVX-512 and AMX enabled just like with Redwood Cove on Xeon 6. Hopefully a public cloud will have an instance for rent when/if those show up.
Expense was high for the Xeon 6 one because I spent perhaps a bit more time than I should testing things, including failed experiments like "can I get more bandwidth via
Thanks for the response, and for being so persistent scouting for additional bandwidth in Xeon 6. Wendell from Level1techs had an interesting video (YT) on his experiences with the largest Xeon 6 (128 cores) in a single socket system. One area where Intel's Xeon 6 still have a bit of a niche are their multi-socket setups; they can utilize enormous amounts of RAM, which might be interesting for really large (several TB) RAM-resident databases (HANA..) and possibly for very large language models. The latter possibly even more so if NVLink becomes available for future Xeons.
Great article! Although I believe ice lake has up to 40 cores, not 28 :P
Ah you're right. I was looking at Intel's Hot Chips slides when they presented Ice Lake SP, and they showed a 28 core die there. But there's a 40 core SKU (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/212287/intel-xeon-platinum-8380-processor-60m-cache-2-30-ghz/specifications.html)
Substack makes it a bit hard to fix tables because there is no table support. They're just images. I'll get to it...
I think some high-core count multiple-chiplet processors will be used to replace older scale-up systems. Currently eight-socket Lenovo x3950 X6 servers are selling for much less than $1000 on eBay.
In my opinion these older 8-socket servers have interesting performance characteristics and make an interesting point of comparison for the new machines.
Thanks Chester, another great deep dive! Appreciate also the inclusion of the Graviton CPU instances, as Hyperscalers like AWS deploy more and more ARM-based servers. Question more related to the AWS rentals: what were (roughly) the relative expenses ( rentals) for the Xeons, the EPYC and AWS's own Graviton at comparable compute capabilities?
And, did you or George hear anything new about the status of the next generation Xeons? I believe it'll be critical for Intel to deliver both Panther Lake for notebooks and the next "Rapid" in 18 Angstrom in the next 6-9 months.
I didn't hear anything besides about Clearwater Forest (288 E-Cores), but I also don't keep up with the rumor mill. Logically they would want to put Lion Cove on the server side, with AVX-512 and AMX enabled just like with Redwood Cove on Xeon 6. Hopefully a public cloud will have an instance for rent when/if those show up.
Expense was high for the Xeon 6 one because I spent perhaps a bit more time than I should testing things, including failed experiments like "can I get more bandwidth via
1-->2
1------>3
or
1--->2<---3
kind of access patterns" (nope)
Thanks for the response, and for being so persistent scouting for additional bandwidth in Xeon 6. Wendell from Level1techs had an interesting video (YT) on his experiences with the largest Xeon 6 (128 cores) in a single socket system. One area where Intel's Xeon 6 still have a bit of a niche are their multi-socket setups; they can utilize enormous amounts of RAM, which might be interesting for really large (several TB) RAM-resident databases (HANA..) and possibly for very large language models. The latter possibly even more so if NVLink becomes available for future Xeons.