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by tareqak 2715 days ago
Quote from the end: "perhaps importantly, there is no warranty from Intel. This means that system builders will not be able to recoup costs on dead silicon, but they might give their own warranty to end users."
5 comments

This would be a pretty significant liability for builders in countries that have automatic consumer protections (eg: Consumer Guarantees Act in NZ). The builders would have to eat the costs of faulty units.
EU has 2y mandatory warranty for any electronics/electrical equipment sold to retail.
That means they probably won’t be sold there.
True, if that’s the cost of our consumer protections I’m okay with that. It’s actually really nice to live under. That said I’ve never been on the retailers end.
Not even implied warranty? Surely intel can't sell broken chips?
DOA warranty for the OEMs. After that, Intel isn't involved.
Where are these chips going to actually end up? Gamers with more money than sense?
HFT
By nature HFT is not highly multithreaded and avoids handoff. So having more cores is not that different than having more discrete CPUs -- no benefits for cache locality/faster coherency.

In that regard if latency is an issue overclocked 8700K (or 8086K) should be sufficient.

Binned & overclocked i9-9980XE’s are already available though. I’m honestly at a bit of a loss to understand Intel’s latest offering. But hey, it made us stop laughing about 10nm for a few minutes.
Isn't their primary concern latency? I doubt a few GHz boost would do anything for them.
>Isn't their primary concern latency?

It is, but at some point you can't do much more about the network latency; shaving off a couple dozen us, might the difference of getting the price/quote or missing it out. Especially, when you play versus similarly equipped firms.

Depends on how low the latency already is. If you're already <0.5ms away network wise then perhaps shearing off 0.1ms from a 1ms operation could make a significant difference.
Also some types of HFT don't rely on network latency at all, it can be based on other factors.
Are there dedicated HFT ICs?
According to a HFT programming talk posted recently there are some trading houses using in-house designed ASICs.
I'm guessing the chance of an eventual calculation error is not worth the potential speed gains (though you could run those Pi calculators to check for CPU stability)

HFT is not so much about CPU speed but algorithmic optimization.

Good question. I agree with your guess though.
I've got this 20GHz bazillion core CPU for a really good price. No warranty, no guarantees, stated or otherwise implied (May or may not work). Call me for price.
Illegal in >half the world.
You sure? If they sold to end users/consumers yes, but B2B you can exclude a lot.
This is probably exactly why they only sell to OEMs. And a select few at that.