By: Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com), January 30, 2013 3:51 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
rwessel (robertwessel.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 29, 2013 10:15 pm wrote:
> Mark Roulo (markroulo.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 29, 2013 6:08 pm wrote:
> > someone (someone.delete@this.somewhere.com) on January 29, 2013 8:58 am wrote:
> > > Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on January 29, 2013 4:42 am wrote:
> > > > Very interesting analysis, thanks.
> > > >
> > > > I think the argument about area and cost - and Intel's processing advantage -
> > > > is all correct. What may be missing is the impact of the different business
> > > > strategies: Intel really wants to sell those server cpus at very high margins -
> > > > say 300mm2 of silicon for $1500.
> > >
> > > Market research companies like Mecury have indicated Intel server MPU ASP is
> > > around $300. The vast majority of units sold are two socket server MPUs that
> > > differ from PC variants of the same device only by feature fusing. The high end
> > > Intel server MPUs with 4 figure prices sell in relatively small quantities and using
> > > them as a strawman for Intel competitiveness in low end servers is fallacious.
> >
> >
> > I have seen this ...
> >
> > http://investorvillage.com/mbthread.asp?mb=476&tid=10759150&showall=1
> >
> > Can't vouch for the accuracy, but the claim is that the
> > average ASP for Intel server chips in Q2 of 2011 was ~$570.
> >
> > The numbers look plausible ...
>
>
> Right, but unless you think that the microserver vendors are likely to be going head to
> head with Intel 2S and larger systems, the relevant datum is the $252 ASP for Xeon UPs.
Unless we think that these customers need the RAS (including ECC), the relevant ASP might be the Value Desktop chips at $57.92. I'm guessing that these are single socket, quad core, dual memory channel chips. I'd expect the individual cores to be faster than current ARM cores, so you might need two Tegra4 (quad core) chips (minus the graphics and wireless) to match throughput performance [Tegra4 would be clocked lower and I expect that Intel gets more done per clock because of better branch predictor, better hardware prefetch, and deeper OoO execution].
The ARM chips would (I think?) have an edge in power (which translates into operating costs), but not a huge edge in purchase price. Two Tegra4s would maybe run $25x2 = $50.
$50 vs $58 isn't a huge win by itself.
The operating cost win of ARM might be ... but the Intel chip is probably ~65W TDP (which probably means more like 30-35W under typical load ... I don't expect the servers these things go into to be hammering the SSE/AVX units much). If the two Tegras need something like 10W total, then the ARM edge is between 20W and 50W per motherboard equivalent. After adding in the power of Ethernet, DRAM, hard drives, etc. does the power advantage for the ARM chips matter enough to switch without a noticeable purchase price advantage? Especially if one expects Haswell chips to come in at less than SandyBridge power budgets?
> Mark Roulo (markroulo.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 29, 2013 6:08 pm wrote:
> > someone (someone.delete@this.somewhere.com) on January 29, 2013 8:58 am wrote:
> > > Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on January 29, 2013 4:42 am wrote:
> > > > Very interesting analysis, thanks.
> > > >
> > > > I think the argument about area and cost - and Intel's processing advantage -
> > > > is all correct. What may be missing is the impact of the different business
> > > > strategies: Intel really wants to sell those server cpus at very high margins -
> > > > say 300mm2 of silicon for $1500.
> > >
> > > Market research companies like Mecury have indicated Intel server MPU ASP is
> > > around $300. The vast majority of units sold are two socket server MPUs that
> > > differ from PC variants of the same device only by feature fusing. The high end
> > > Intel server MPUs with 4 figure prices sell in relatively small quantities and using
> > > them as a strawman for Intel competitiveness in low end servers is fallacious.
> >
> >
> > I have seen this ...
> >
> > http://investorvillage.com/mbthread.asp?mb=476&tid=10759150&showall=1
> >
> > Can't vouch for the accuracy, but the claim is that the
> > average ASP for Intel server chips in Q2 of 2011 was ~$570.
> >
> > The numbers look plausible ...
>
>
> Right, but unless you think that the microserver vendors are likely to be going head to
> head with Intel 2S and larger systems, the relevant datum is the $252 ASP for Xeon UPs.
Unless we think that these customers need the RAS (including ECC), the relevant ASP might be the Value Desktop chips at $57.92. I'm guessing that these are single socket, quad core, dual memory channel chips. I'd expect the individual cores to be faster than current ARM cores, so you might need two Tegra4 (quad core) chips (minus the graphics and wireless) to match throughput performance [Tegra4 would be clocked lower and I expect that Intel gets more done per clock because of better branch predictor, better hardware prefetch, and deeper OoO execution].
The ARM chips would (I think?) have an edge in power (which translates into operating costs), but not a huge edge in purchase price. Two Tegra4s would maybe run $25x2 = $50.
$50 vs $58 isn't a huge win by itself.
The operating cost win of ARM might be ... but the Intel chip is probably ~65W TDP (which probably means more like 30-35W under typical load ... I don't expect the servers these things go into to be hammering the SSE/AVX units much). If the two Tegras need something like 10W total, then the ARM edge is between 20W and 50W per motherboard equivalent. After adding in the power of Ethernet, DRAM, hard drives, etc. does the power advantage for the ARM chips matter enough to switch without a noticeable purchase price advantage? Especially if one expects Haswell chips to come in at less than SandyBridge power budgets?