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by spamizbad 2749 days ago
Intel might be giving major buyers sweetheart deals on their chip prices. So while an EPYC 7371 might get discounted 20% to an Amazon, Intel may be discounting 50-70% (Gain of salt: just speculation on my part). And when you consider these CPUs are in systems where most of your costs are likely in RAM, NVMe, and supporting infrastructure.

These are high margin parts, so I imagine there's wiggle room for volume.

1 comments

Not a chance. Intel is selling every CPU they can print. Enterprise customers are paying a premium at the moment.
STH previously reported that Intel began offering Xeon discounts to smaller organizations that asked for AMD EPYC price quotes.

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-is-serving-major-xeon-dis...

That's a niche market. Intel has the larger players by the balls. Very few companies are comparison shopping AMD vs Intel.
You say that, but AWS has still launched EC2 instances with both AMD and ARM CPU cores recently. I imagine Amazon buy enough Intel CPUs for them to take notice.
I wonder if the primary driver for buying and offering alternative platforms for EC2 instances was to send Intel a message. "We aren't afraid to go to AMD if you don't make your offering more competitive."
That is not because there is far more demand than they can cope, it was because they had to fulfil Apple's modem order.