Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on January 1, 2021 12:48 pm wrote:
> 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).

Well, I certainly agree about 24 and especially 32 core case, as the best Intel has available in HEDT is still just 18 cores. However, if one needs PCIe lanes or quad-channel memory, and not just more cores, price per core is significantly higher for Threadripper (and at least as far as retailers in Finland are considered, so is the cost of motherboard).

That said, for personal desktop I would go with AMD and at work we are also buying Ryzen 9s and Threadrippers (depending on whether 16 cores is enough and how much NVME storage are we planning on installing).

So yeah, I do very much agree AMD has superior offering. ECC doesn't really matter here though.

> 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.

Skylake i9s (the HEDT ones) had cost of about 100 $/€ per core from 10 to 18 cores. Before Skylake, HEDT CPUs with high core count had so low boost clocks that we couldn't really consider them at work. Situation was the same with Xeons (I don't recall when Intel introduced W Xeons that finally fixed that. They surely were and probably still are expensive). I think that was a much bigger problem than price itself, though maybe I just didn't pay attention to price, because the product wasn't interesting even if we've gotten it for free.

> 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 don't really see AMD's unofficial ECC support being a big deal. Maybe it is for you, and maybe you know more about it than I do. I just see it as too limiting (in choices of motherboard) and too expensive (in time and money) to bother with, as there isn't clear information about what that "unofficial" means.

-JLarja