Intel’s New CPUs are Cringe

[Other James]

After a long, looooooong development cycle Intel has finally launched their lineup of Sapphire Rapids Xeon Server CPUs. But AMD already has some incredible chips in their Epyc Genoa lineup, which boast up to 96 cores on the highend. How is Intel supposed to compete when they have fewer cores and are running on last gen’s architecture? Accelerators. They hope.

 

 

Check out Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 Processors: https://lmg.gg/nJmkU

Check out AMD Epyc 9654 Processors: https://lmg.gg/NXFm1

Check out the Super Micro IoT SYS-220H-TNR Super Server: https://lmg.gg/tU2h7

 

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

[OhYou_]

intel cringe amd based

[Tsarbomb]

A huge reason why Intel has the market share they do is because they've become the new IBM in the old phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM". 

 

At a previous job I got massive pushback from IT when I specced out our new server purchases with AMD instead of Intel to be used by my software engineering group. The overall price tag was the better part of half a million dollars and we were quite literally getting double the core count and yet at every step of the way I had to justify why AMD instead of Intel even though we were going through the exact same SuperMicro reseller that we always used. Worst part was when the servers arrived we had issues with getting them to boot. It turned out that an entire batch of micron drives had bad/corrupt firmware and the vendor sent us a new batch that worked right away but somehow the doofus running the IT department Dunning Kruger-ed himself by trying to turn it into a "I toldya so" moment. 

[Radium_Angel]

9 minutes ago, Tsarbomb said:

A huge reason why Intel has the market share they do is because they've become the new IBM in the old phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM". 

 

At a previous job I got massive pushback from IT when I specced out our new server purchases with AMD instead of Intel to be used by my software engineering group. The overall price tag was the better part of half a million dollars and we were quite literally getting double the core count and yet at every step of the way I had to justify why AMD instead of Intel even though we were going through the exact same SuperMicro reseller that we always used. Worst part was when the servers arrived we had issues with getting them to boot. It turned out that an entire batch of micron drives had bad/corrupt firmware and the vendor sent us a new batch that worked right away but somehow the doofus running the IT department Dunning Kruger-ed himself by trying to turn it into a "I toldya so" moment. 

Ditto where I work (but granted, money is no object as I'm in gov't) AMD isn't even a consideration...it's Intel, or nothing. Even vendor owned gear isn't allowed to have AMD parts for "compatibility reasons" which is total BS. There hasn't been "compatibility" issues since the days of Cyrix.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

Is Linus going to end up murdering Jake with an Intel CPU, instead of firing him? We need answers to this highly important question!

 

But as to why folks still go for Intel, it's generally less painful to deal with Intel hardware: Their driver updates don't brick your OS or hardware , they tend to hit the listed hardware specs with some margin to spare instead of the several pages of footnotes you run into with AMD, they seem to test things before they release them to the public in most instances (Arc seeming to be somewhat of an exception), Intel has pretty good compilers that can target specific CPU models while AMD's equivalent (AOCC) is somewhat crummy which can really make a difference in math heavy applications, and if there are issues Intel is often surprisingly quick to fix things. Meanwhile, none of the above things are guaranteed with AMD, so I can totally imagine companies going for Intel until AMD gets around to fixing their reputation on these matters.

 

34 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

There hasn't been "compatibility" issues since the days of Cyrix.

There've been other issues, like some of the Athlon 64 SKUs had some odd issues with running the Sun JVM, it worked but it was so painfully slow it was defacto useless, meaning you had to run the Microsoft JVM.

[manikyath]

i remember talking to my seniors back when first gen epyc arrived, and i told them "this is what our customer needs to accomodate their growth."

 

they bought intel "because this amd thing is cheaper so it's obviously not a premium product" (yes.. that's actually what they said..) and... that server.. was upgraded, upgraded again.. and got a twin next to it because they needed more....

all of which was still slower than the Epyc box that was "cheaper"... same server OEM by the way, just stupid blind management.

 

the irony is that they ended up migrating a lot to azure, where it now runs.. on epyc.

why did they migrate to azure? because it was more expensive than AWS, so clearly it was better. (again.. yes.)

[Kizune]

Responded under the video. The cringe of Linus handling Intel CPU absolutely incorrectly is beyond painful. There is a video on ServeTheHome channel on how to install the new Intel CPU properly:

It works absolutely the same for LGA4677. There is a process. And there is a reason for that process. And Linus dripping thermal paste into the socket potentially killing the motherboard is one of the reasons.

 

And what's up with your benchmarks? They are so bad! Here, i have just a single Xeon Platinum 8461V, the same number of cores and threads but lower turbo boost clock and significantly lower TDP (and my CPU was power restrained all the time):

And you got what? +12% from adding a whole second CPU? Not mentioning that i only have 2 sticks of RAM in my system effectively reducing memory bandwidth by 75%. I do not think your score is correct at all.

[Tony1337]

1 hour ago, Kizune said:

Responded under the video. The cringe of Linus handling Intel CPU absolutely incorrectly is beyond painful. There is a video on ServeTheHome channel on how to install the new Intel CPU properly:

It works absolutely the same for LGA4677. There is a process. And there is a reason for that process. And Linus dripping thermal paste into the socket potentially killing the motherboard is one of the reasons.

 

And what's up with your benchmarks? They are so bad! Here, i have just a single Xeon Platinum 8461V, the same number of cores and threads but lower turbo boost clock and significantly lower TDP (and my CPU was power restrained all the time):

And you got what? +12% from adding a whole second CPU? Not mentioning that i only have 2 sticks of RAM in my system effectively reducing memory bandwidth by 75%. I do not think your score is correct at all.

Cope?

[VicBar]

I'm kinda racking my brain to see if I understood this wrong or if Linus was reading "Intel's competitor" and thought "AMD" and then confused the two.... now I'm confused :&

 

9 second clip from the latest video:

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxI1eTwKmHNVqTA4vgaTDLNTWdb9ksxvo3

 

[Arika]

10 hours ago, jamesscott said:

But AMD already has some incredible chips in their Epyc Genoa lineup, which boast up to 96 cores on the highend.

sooooo....what? they shouldn't release them because something is already better?

it wasn't that long ago that AMD was in that situation and if they just stopped we wouldn’t have the competition we have now.

 

really getting sick of this bullshit.

 

 

[iLikeBananas]

was dropping the thermal paste into the socket really not a big deal? Asking because I genuinely don't know, but it has to be a disaster, right?

[dogwitch]

both have their uses. but amd server stuff look better and better every day.

cinbench  no one uses that for server choosing.

[Lyre]

Intel is really falling behind amd, i get that they care about the future but when I source products I look for the "now now" not for the future. I fell like this video was weaker than normal, Less enthusiasm than normal, I didn't even realize that Linus BROKE THE SERVER until I read some comments, there was an easy dram for the video that was just glanced over. I don't really mind the deep ad integration either although there was a lot of this video that was just ad read even on float plane.  

[finkn]

English is not my primary language.

hardware procurement here. As is usually the case with enterprise products, Linus is missing important information. The absolutely most important thing when purchasing new hardware is the ability to integrate it into the existing environment. Let's assume that the existing environment consists of 2000 Cisco B200 M6 with Intel CPUs and is managed via Intersight or UCS Manager. The environment is used dynamically for VM and baremetal workloads. Thus, the hardware clusters must be extremely well managed and portioned. Even a few systems with other CPUs (Platinum 8368 to Gold xy) can make cluster management very difficult. The engineering of the new platform is also added, which would also come with the crunch time of daily business when changing to a hybrid structure.

 

Furthermore, it is not the CPU performance that is decisive for virtualization, but the main memory per unit, which accounts for 80%.

Most VMs run most of the times very light or few workloads.

I can write more if there is demand.
 

[Lyre]

10 hours ago, iLikeBananas said:

was dropping the thermal paste into the socket really not a big deal? Asking because I genuinely don't know, but it has to be a disaster, right?

If I rember correctly they mentioned on WAN show last week that they broke that server. I kinda feel like they missed the ball just ignoring that fact in the video

[GodAtum]

So I guess he wont be invited back to the Intel factory 

[Kizune]

Ok, a small update, i was wondering if maybe 8468 is slower than my 8461V so i begged folks at the lab and they gave me one. It is in fact faster. So how the actual F were you able to score 67K on two of these if i can score 61K on just one? Supermicro motherboard, looser grade cooler, default settings - no overclocking, nothing. How? Do you guys even benchmark?

 

Drag race? More like dragging down.