News Intel Is Reducing Server Chip Pricing in Attempt to Stem the AMD Tide

[Admin]

Intel is reportedly stemming AMD's onslaught onto the server market via price reductions, taking advantage of vertical integration and the general chip shortage to sway clients away from AMD.

Intel Is Reducing Server Chip Pricing in Attempt to Stem the AMD Tide : Read more

 

[JayNor]

"there seems to be no particular technological reason why Intel regained market share..."

Intel shipped Ice Lake Server chips during the quarter, along with a new generation of Optane memory. Ice Lake server added several new features for avx512.

AMD's cores still only include avx2 and have not yet implemented the equivalent of Intel's int8 dlboost or the bfloat16 processing available in Cooper Lake server chips.

 

[spongiemaster]

"there seems to be no particular technological reason why Intel regained market share..."

Intel shipped Ice Lake Server chips during the quarter, along with a new generation of Optane memory.

Indeed. It's not really a technological advantage, but a manufacturing advantage. Intel still has all their 14nm capacity, now you add Ice Lake on 10nm, and Intel likely saw a pretty significant increase in chip capacity in the server space which AMD can't match. Big increase in capacity in a supply constrained market equals increased market share.

 

[Jimbojan]

Intel is about to put out its new server, it is better to clear the deck now before Jan. 2022

 

[Liquidrider]

I am sure Intel would like to spin it that way, but the truth is they don't have a choice. The power consumption behind their chips is ridiculous. And in order to offset those costs for clients, they have to lower the prices or risk losing more contracts. You don't even have to look that far back in time. It was only a few weeks ago Cloudflare chose AMD for that very reason. The cost of running Intel's wasn't worth it. "Intel’s Performance per Watt was unattractive "

 

[JayNor]

The power consumption behind their chips is ridiculous.

Intel has a Grand Ridge platform with 24 Gracemont cores on some leaked roadmap slides as a successor to their P5900 Snow Ridge family that used Tremont cores. Perhaps it is a sign of things to come for Data Center and cloud servers.

With several stories floating around about Intel having large TSM N3 reservations, it also wouldn't be surprising to see Intel create high efficiency server chips there while continuing their high performance Sapphire Rapids and successors in their own fabs.

Intel has said it will increasingly use TSM to create tiles/chiplets, as they are doing for the Xe-HPC compute tiles, so it also would not be surprising for TSM N3 high efficiency core tiles to be reused in multiple products... including as compute tiles available to IFS customers.

 

[everettfsargent]

So, Intel = China, dumping their big iron at a loss to maintain their monopoly status. Go China, hmm, err, Intel.

 

[spongiemaster]

So, Intel = China, dumping their big iron at a loss to maintain their monopoly status. Go China, hmm, err, Intel.

It's pretty much impossible to sell server CPU's at a loss. Intel could reduce the price by over 90% and still pull a profit. They're obviously not going to do that, nor would they have to to keep key customers in their court.

 

[ingtar33]

It's pretty much impossible to sell server CPU's at a loss. Intel could reduce the price by over 90% and still pull a profit. They're obviously not going to do that, nor would they have to to keep key customers in their court.

intel did just that 20 years ago... basically gave away chips to prevent Athlon and it's server chip equivalent Opteron cpus from getting market traction back when intel's netburst was failing everywhere.