News Intel Fires Up Xeon Max CPUs, GPUs To Rival AMD, Nvidia

[Admin]

Intel formally unveils Xeon Max 'Sapphire Rapids HBM' CPUs and Data Center GPU Max Series 'Ponte Vecchio' GPUs.

Intel Fires Up Xeon Max CPUs, GPUs To Rival AMD, Nvidia : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

I just want a old 8275cl for daily use. These new chips are insane...

 

[lorfa]

HBM as system memory, fascinating

 

[TerryLaze]

HBM as system memory, fascinating

Yeah, 64Gb of onboard HBME that can work as both system ram or cache for real ram, no wonder they shut down optane.

I wonder how long it's going to take for it to become cheap enough to end up in the normal desktop lineup in 4 or 8Gb versions. Not only would you have the performance of 3dVcache but you could use the CPU without any actual ddr ram making it much cheaper. (Or maybe it will just balance out the cost of the HBM)

 

[bit_user]

HBM as system memory, fascinating

FWIW, I thought it would happen years ago. And I actually guessed AMD would be first, since they already had experience with HBM, in their Fury and Vega GPUs.

That said, Intel did launch Xeon Phi (KNL) with 16 GB of in-package McDRAM, back in 2016. And it could even slot into a normal sever CPU socket and use the DDR4 DIMMs as well. So, this isn't even their first go at a CPU with in-package memory.

...and then there's Lakefield, but probably the less said about that, the better.
; )

no wonder they shut down optane.

No, they shut down Optane because it offered no benefits over battery-backed DRAM. Even cost-wise, it just couldn't keep ahead.

Assuming it had maintained a cost advantage over DRAM, what I was expecting to see was Optane essentially being used as "swap space", so you could scale up capacity of these HBM-equipped servers into the many TBs. Instead, it looks like they'll have to make due with conventional DRAM DIMMs, and any nonvolatile storage will probably live out on the CXL bus. Eventually, I think direct-connected memory might get entirely replaced by CXL, so you have just that + whatever is in-package.

I wonder how long it's going to take for it to become cheap enough to end up in the normal desktop lineup in 4 or 8Gb versions.

Uh, like 2 years ago, when Apple launched the M1. Okay, that was LPDDR4, but it was still stacks of DRAM in-package. The M1 Max then showed how you can scale performance, by upgrading it to LPDDR5 and widening the memory bus to 256-bit.

you could use the CPU without any actual ddr ram making it much cheaper.

I wonder how much cost-savings there is. Certainly, the motherboard gets cheaper, because you don't have DIMM slots and you can reduce the number of contacts in the socket (not to mention the traces connecting them). You'd save money on the DIMMs, but the actual DRAM dies still cost the same, and what you save on the physical DIMM might simply offset the added packaging costs of integrating the DRAM stacks.

The obvious downside is that if one of your DRAM dies eats it, you have to trash the whole package and get a replacement. If it's BGA, say goodbye to the entire motherboard, also. Yay, disposable tech!

That said, if it's just isolated errors, you can exclude those pages from use. And DDR5 has internal ECC, which could potentially make it more reliable, depending on how much they provision.

 

[TerryLaze]

No, they shut down Optane because it offered no benefits over battery-backed DRAM. Even cost-wise, it just couldn't keep ahead.

Assuming it had maintained a cost advantage over DRAM,

Are you talking about the DIMMs?
Because according to articles optane DIMMs even though very expensive were extremely cheap compared to normal DRAM, and maybe even more important you could get amounts of ram that would just be impossible to reach with only normal ram.
Less than $1000 compared to well over $4000 is a huge difference.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-optane-dimm-pricing-performance,39007.html

	128GB Optane DIMM	256GB Optane DIMM	512GB Optane DIMM
Intel System Pricing Guidance	$577	$2,125	$6,751
CompSource	$892	$2,850	-
ShopBLT	$842	$2,668	$7,816
Colfax Direct	$695	$2,595	$8,250
Conventional DRAM	~$4,500	Not Available	Not Available

 

[bit_user]

Are you talking about the DIMMs?

I'm talking about DRAM. Instead of having an Optane U.2 drive, you could have a U.2 drive full of DDR4 + a NVMe controller and a battery, for instance.

The price I'm seeing for 64 GB DDR4 DIMMs is something like $3.45 per GB, whereas if we look at the Optane P5800X 1.6 TB, it's $2.36 per GB. Still better, but definitely uncomfortably close, especially when you consider that DDR4 is even faster and has even higher write-endurance. I'm guessing someone at Intel worked out the trend lines and found they cross in the not-too-distantant future.

That said, I don't know what's going on with that Optane DIMM pricing, because that's already noncompetitive, on a raw per-GB basis, with DDR4. And when I go to Newegg and look at pricing of 128 GB server DIMMs, I see SK Hynix memory for $1500 per DIMM. BTW, that's still DDR4 as Newegg hasn't started selling DDR5 server memory.

However, I think it's a mistake to limit this to DIMMs, because CXL is going to throw the doors wide open to various form factors.

 

[samopa]

The obvious downside is that if one of your DRAM dies eats it, you have to trash the whole package and get a replacement. If it's BGA, say goodbye to the entire motherboard, also. Yay, disposable tech!

That's the reason Apple implemented it in their devices 😉

 

[samopa]

...and then there's Lakefield, but probably the less said about that, the better.

What is Lakefield ?
I have no collection of memory about that, I'm too old to remember that ...

 

[bit_user]

What is Lakefield ?
I have no collection of memory about that, I'm too old to remember that ...

It was actually a pretty bold product by Intel, considering how many technologies it pioneered (hybrid cores, die-stacking, and in-package memory). It just didn't have stellar market success, perhaps partly falling victim to poor support for hybrid CPUs in Windows, as well as the decision to disable AVX/AVX2 in the P-core due to the E-cores lacking it. I think it also suffered from being positioned as a premium product, yet it probably lacked the performance of one.

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-lakefield-foveros-3d-chip-stack-hybrid-processor,40205.html
• https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel...what-makes-Lakefield-so-special.470160.0.html
• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-lakefield-cpu-specs
• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/i...e-and-personal-in-the-lenovo-x1-fold-teardown
• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-lakefield-cpu-benchmarks-show-promising-performance
• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-retires-lakefield

One bright point about Lakefield is that it had probably the coolest promo gimmick of any CPU I've ever heard of:

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​

I bet those lego kits would probably fetch a pretty penny among CPU collectors.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Are you talking about the DIMMs?
Because according to articles optane DIMMs even though very expensive were extremely cheap compared to normal DRAM, and maybe even more important you could get amounts of ram that would just be impossible to reach with only normal ram.
Less than $1000 compared to well over $4000 is a huge difference.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-optane-dimm-pricing-performance,39007.html

	128GB Optane DIMM	256GB Optane DIMM	512GB Optane DIMM
Intel System Pricing Guidance	$577	$2,125	$6,751
CompSource	$892	$2,850	-
ShopBLT	$842	$2,668	$7,816
Colfax Direct	$695	$2,595	$8,250
Conventional DRAM	~$4,500	Not Available	Not Available

That is from 2019. I can tell you from pricing out servers with Optane or just DRAM that in 2021/22 the difference in price for 128GB Optane was only 1/2 that of actual DIMMs. Throw in all the other issues using Optane Memory and it just wasn't worth while for companies to use. In order to use non-volatile nature of Optane you had to have software that was aware of it for App Direct Mode. Otherwise you could only use it in Memory Mode so it lost the non-volatility and for best performance you needed a 1:4 ratio RAM:Optane. At that point it was basically the same price to use 12x 64GB DIMMs vs 6x 32GB + 6x 128GB Optane.

 

[PC Hardware Nerd]

Yeah, 64Gb of onboard HBME that can work as both system ram or cache for real ram, no wonder they shut down optane.

I wonder how long it's going to take for it to become cheap enough to end up in the normal desktop lineup in 4 or 8Gb versions. Not only would you have the performance of 3dVcache but you could use the CPU without any actual ddr ram making it much cheaper. (Or maybe it will just balance out the cost of the HBM)

I would love to see this happen but would prefer, with the memory density available today, 16GB or more along with expandable ram. I thinking it could make a great tiered setup and significantly speed up client computers.

 

[bit_user]

To whom it may concern: the tables are messed up. The headings are shifted left by 1 column. You could probably fix it by adding a heading for the left-most column - maybe call it "Attribute" or "Specification".