Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

[SteinFG]

"Enjoy Dramatic Level of Performance" feat. Intel

I Don't Like When People Capitalize Every Word In a Sentence

 

[gaav87]

I Don't Like When People Capitalize Every Word In a Sentence

But that is on intel official arrowlake product page xD With the capitalizations.

 

[quikah]

Here is the trailer

https://twitter.com/x/status/1846955368364364167

Posting images of empty motherboards doesn't really help your case. Be realisitic. You REALLY think they will have a fully ready saleable 8 socket system in 4-6 months?

 

[Dayman1225]

Posting images of empty motherboards doesn't really help your case. Be realisitic. You REALLY think they will have a fully ready saleable 8 socket system in 4-6 months?

What makes you think they won’t?

 

[DavidC1]

They haven't even released the 2 socket systems yet, you expect them to have the 8 socket systems ready Q1? You are dreaming.

So you think 8 socket system will be taking 4x as long to come out or something?

 

[igor_kavinski]

A backward minded and politics driven organization like Intel entrenched in their old ways will do anything at this point to try to get their customers back to the good old days of raking in profits by maintaining the status quo of artificially held back progress. What's the best way to sell more CPUs per server? 8S! 8 times the profits! Most dumb IT managers will expect these to be 8 times faster than single socket systems when they are actually not. I've had to forcefully block the sale of a 2S system to my organization because the vendor had no clue about software performance and just kept harping on the benefits of having two CPUs for one price crap.

 

[511]

A backward minded and politics driven organization like Intel entrenched in their old ways will do anything at this point to try to get their customers back to the good old days of raking in profits by maintaining the status quo of artificially held back progress. What's the best way to sell more CPUs per server? 8S! 8 times the profits! Most dumb IT managers will expect these to be 8 times faster than single socket systems when they are actually not. I've had to forcefully block the sale of a 2S system to my organization because the vendor had no clue about software performance and just kept harping on the benefits of having two CPUs for one price crap.

There is more to 8S system Some markets have real use case for the 8S configs that's why they were made in the first place as for Two cpu no one can find a reason for doing illogical things unless it is a bargain in TCO

 

[DrMrLordX]

Some markets have real use case for the 8S configs that's why they were made in the first place

8P systems date back to an era when x86 server/workstation CPUs had one core each. There were perfectly good reasons why such systems could be desirable.

as for Two cpu no one can find a reason for doing illogical things unless it is a bargain in TCO

2P has been the max config for plenty of rack mounted systems for at least a decade now. 8P is comparatively rare.

 

[511]

I don't disagree with you but they have their niche to justify making it for Intel at least which is bleeding money now

 

[igor_kavinski]

I don't disagree with you but they have their niche to justify making it for Intel at least which is bleeding money now

They can easily make money by selling an 8S based supercluster to some shmuck government

 

[511]

They can easily make money by selling an 8S based supercluster to some shmuck government

As long as they justify the investment in 8S i don't see the problem 128 cores 8S would have been better 🙂

 

[itsmydamnation]

8s has like 1 purpose, stupid big db and that's it. Everything else it will be far worse then the same space with 2s systems.

Especially after Intel killed optaine there were requests to market in the area I work in that you could only fulfill with power.

 

[quikah]

What makes you think they won’t?

So you think 8 socket system will be taking 4x as long to come out or something?

Past experience has shown there is a 4-6 month lag in >2 socket. Sapphire Rapids was released Jan 10, 2023, supermicro released their 8socket Sapphire system in May 9 (industry first according to them).

Supermicro Leads the Industry with the First Eight-Socket and Four-Socket Servers for the Most Demanding Enterprise, Database, and Mission-Critical Workloads, Based On Intel CPUs | Supermicro

With Up To 480 Cores, 32TB of Memory, and 12 GPUs, These Systems Can Power Generative AI on SAP and Oracle Workflows in Real Time

www.supermicro.com

Granite Rapids that can support >2p hasn't released yet. so most likely release windows for 8p systems is mid 2025. All resources should be going into the mainstream 1p/2p systems.

 

[jpiniero]

8s has like 1 purpose, stupid big db and that's it.

I think there's more than just that but that's probably the biggest.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I think there's more than just that but that's probably the biggest.

Please enlighten us. What kind of other workloads can tolerate socket to socket latencies?

 

[DavidC1]

Please enlighten us. What kind of other workloads can tolerate socket to socket latencies?

Transactional Compute, Databases, HPC, they all need many hundreds of CPUs, and socket to socket is better than going through external interconnects.

8S systems are still significant part of Intel server. Last time I remember it's about 20%.

 

[Markfw]

Transactional Compute, Databases, HPC, they all need many hundreds of CPUs, and socket to socket is better than going through external interconnects.

8S systems are still significant part of Intel server. Last time I remember it's about 20%.

Not to go off-topic, but Intels competition has 768 on one motherboard, so thats not the only option for a datacenter.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Last time I remember it's about 20%.

Should be less.
Even turnkey DB boxes like Exadata can tolerate 2p spam, see the recent Genoa-powered ones.

 

[Markfw]

Should be less.
Even turnkey DB boxes like Exadata can tolerate 2p spam, see the recent Genoa-powered ones.

But that 2P, not 8P. Would that be a lot worse ????

 

[DavidC1]

Should be less.
Even turnkey DB boxes like Exadata can tolerate 2p spam, see the recent Genoa-powered ones.

How much less? 20% to 18%, or 2%? Because if it's still in the double digits then it's still an area they can't ignore.

I remember one quarter where everything else did well but the Enterprise section didn't so the revenue didn't look as good.

This is same as the folks saying the gaming desktops are irrelevant. Exist50 said that they were, and the market for it are far greater than HEDT or the professional segment. Without them the desktop consists of $400 Celeron/Pentium towers, and used markets that couldn't care less as long as they have Skylake and better.

Their ASPs for client in the Sandy Bridge days were about $110. The volume may not be big as notebooks, but Desktops are still 35% of the market and gaming chips are easily twice the ASP.

Also, losing 1% here and 1% there will add up. Death by thousand needles isn't that the saying?

 

[itsmydamnation]

People missing the point , the reason to have an 8S box is not compute , it is memory foot print. Stupidly big in memory DB's.

if your HPC workload fits on one box your not really HPC.

especially in the world of PCI-E accelerators 8S is way more bottlenecked then they used to be.

 

[MoistOintment]

There is more to 8S system Some markets have real use case for the 8S configs that's why they were made in the first place as for Two cpu no one can find a reason for doing illogical things unless it is a bargain in TCO

We run 2S systems because a lot of our LoB applications are single threaded, with core count impacting the number of concurrent user sessions and ST impacting the performance a user receives. So a lower core count, higher clockspeed 2S variant was better for our needs than the same core count in a 1S system that clocked lower.

That, and management is cheap and doesn't want us using more than 1 rack in our primary COLO, so compute density per U matters.