[adrian_b]

Intel can offer a low TCO only for the big customers mentioned by you, who buy 10000+ servers and have the force to negotiate big discounts from Intel, buying the CPUs at prices several times lower that their list prices.

On the other hand, for any small businesses or individual users, who have no choice but to buy at the list prices or more, the TCO for the Intel server CPUs has become unacceptably bad. Before 2017, until the Broadwell Xeons, the TCO for the Intel server CPUs could be very good, even when bought at retail for a single server. However starting with the Skylake Server Xeons, the price for the non-crippled Xeon SKUs has increased so much that they have been no longer a good choice, except for the very big customers who buy them much cheaper than the official prices.

The fact that Intel must discount so much their server CPUs for the big customers is likely to explain a good part of their huge financial losses during the last quarters.