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by ineedasername 2506 days ago
Your right about pricing power. I think the net benefit from new competitive AMD chips will be to force Intel to adjust its premium pricing. Personally when I'm looking for personal needs or pricing out a build for use in work (basically not quite "big" data, but data about as big as can be done on a single high-end workstation) I don't really care about brand. I care about cost-performance factors, and component compatibility. I'll happily choose AMD if they're a 20% discount over Intel
1 comments

I think STH's writeup does a particularly good analysis here: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-deliv...

The second is important. Customers need to adopt AMD EPYC. To our readers, it is important when you get a quote to at minimum quote an AMD EPYC alternative on every order. More important, follow through and buy ones where Intel is not competitive. If AMD EPYC 7002, with a massive core count, memory bandwidth, PCIe generation and lane count, power consumption, and pricing advantage cannot take significant share, we are basically done. If AMD does not gain enormous share with this much of a lead, and easy compatibility, Intel officially has a monopoly on the market and companies like Ampere and Marvell should shut down their Arm projects. If AMD does not gain significant share, there is no merit to having a wholistically better product than Intel.

As for bettering cost-performance, the full review gives plenty of context that the new Epyc 2's soundly beat out the current Intel Xeon lineup (often by 2X or more), but I think AMD is also doing what they need to do get marketshare (while still raising their ASPs):

When it comes to the top-bin SKUs, the value proposition is simple, just get a higher-end SKU and consolidate more servers to save money. AMD is extracting value for the higher-core count SKUs. For AMD a chip with 64-cores, 256MB L3 cache, 128x PCIe Gen4 lanes at just under $7000 compares favorably when its nearest Intel Xeon competitors are two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280M SKUs (M for the higher-memory capacity) that run just over $13,000 each. AMD at around $7000 is essentially saying Intel needs to start their discounting at 73% to get competitive, and that is not taking into account using fewer servers.

On the AMD EPYC 7702P side, AMD is calling Intel that if it wants to be performance competitive, it needs to discount two Platinum 8280M’s by 83% plus the incremental cost of a dual-socket server versus a single-socket server. This is a big deal.