Look out! Chemtrails!!!1!
Someone hasn't seen newer intel products with many, many cores.
56 cores at 400+ watts
Xeon 9200 is outrageously expensive, is soldered to the board and so far I haven't seen any big OEMs like Dell or HP pick up a design with it.
That means no nice extra features for management like iLO or iDRAC and god help you if you have a board or CPU failure. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater on the replacement.
Sure, Cooper Lake MIGHT fix that, but at 14nm++, i'm doubtful they'll be able to drop wattages on the socketed part significantly without also tanking clock speeds.
AMD is significantly advantaged on any workload that isn't exceptionally clock speed sensitive like HFT.
Even with the increased licensing cost, AMD still might make more sense as some vendors are offering single socket solutions which cost quite a bit less than the two socket variants.
A 64 core Epyc 7742 is $7500 list vs a Xeon Platinum 8280M at 28 cores and $13000 list
128 lanes of PCIe gen 4 provides more than ample IO for NVMe, 100GbE, GPUs or all of the above.
Even with VMware licensing being the same between a single 7742 and a pair of 8280m's, you're losing 8 cores and paying 3.5x as much in CPUs which is going to significantly inflate your per-node cost.
A real fast comparison of list prices of the R6515 with a 7742 and 12 x 32gb dimms vs a R640 with a pair of 8280m with all other bits being identical: Network card, PERC, drive config, drive cage config.
The R640 was $38k and the R6515 was $18k
Yes, volume customer DOL will bring both prices down significantly, but that's a huge price disadvantage for Intel
For virtualization, I fail to see any compelling reason NOT to go AMD here.