By: Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org), January 1, 2021 1:48 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 1, 2021 10:52 am wrote:
>
> I haven't made a proper comparison now, but at least about two years ago, price of a
> single-socket Xeon wasn't any higher than comparable i5 or i7 (i9 may be different).
The discussion was about the high-core-count cases, which are the only ones relevant when comparing to Threadripper.
(And by "relevant" I mean "not really any more" - Intel just isn't competitive in this area at all right now).
Yes, Intel finally ended up cutting their prices last year (obviously because of Ryzen and Threadripper), but it was a "too little, much too late" situation. The Intel high-core-count CPU's used to be very expensive, and the prices were cut dramatically only once AMD had taken the performance crown away from Intel - decisively.
Basically, Intel used to be king of the hill - and took advantage of it with some fairly extreme market segmentation. Fair enough - I can see why they did it, and apart from their ECC stance I was perfectly happy with their consumer offerings. I would have liked more cores, but it didn't make sense with their pricing, so I took the high-end consumer chips.
But if you're doing market segmentation like Intel did, you had better make sure that you stay king of the hill. Because decades of being annoyed with their segmentation model means that when they stumbled and their competition didn't, I was more than happy to switch away from them. No Stockholm syndrome for me.
I suspect I'm not the only one. Intel's marketing antics meant that there was a pent up demand for alternatives. Obviously the ARM people would have loved to fill that demand, but right now it's AMD that stepped up instead.
Maybe Intel can improve on their situation, but I haven't seen any signs of it on their roadmap yet. And similarly, maybe some ARM vendor can do the same, but in the workstation market I'm not really seeing that either (outside of the Apple case, of course).
We'll see.
Linus
>
> I haven't made a proper comparison now, but at least about two years ago, price of a
> single-socket Xeon wasn't any higher than comparable i5 or i7 (i9 may be different).
The discussion was about the high-core-count cases, which are the only ones relevant when comparing to Threadripper.
(And by "relevant" I mean "not really any more" - Intel just isn't competitive in this area at all right now).
Yes, Intel finally ended up cutting their prices last year (obviously because of Ryzen and Threadripper), but it was a "too little, much too late" situation. The Intel high-core-count CPU's used to be very expensive, and the prices were cut dramatically only once AMD had taken the performance crown away from Intel - decisively.
Basically, Intel used to be king of the hill - and took advantage of it with some fairly extreme market segmentation. Fair enough - I can see why they did it, and apart from their ECC stance I was perfectly happy with their consumer offerings. I would have liked more cores, but it didn't make sense with their pricing, so I took the high-end consumer chips.
But if you're doing market segmentation like Intel did, you had better make sure that you stay king of the hill. Because decades of being annoyed with their segmentation model means that when they stumbled and their competition didn't, I was more than happy to switch away from them. No Stockholm syndrome for me.
I suspect I'm not the only one. Intel's marketing antics meant that there was a pent up demand for alternatives. Obviously the ARM people would have loved to fill that demand, but right now it's AMD that stepped up instead.
Maybe Intel can improve on their situation, but I haven't seen any signs of it on their roadmap yet. And similarly, maybe some ARM vendor can do the same, but in the workstation market I'm not really seeing that either (outside of the Apple case, of course).
We'll see.
Linus