Friday, October 4th 2024
Intel's Flagship 128-Core Xeon 6980P Processor Sets Record $17,800 Flagship Price
The title has no typo, and what you are reading is correct. Intel's flagship 128-core 256-threaded CPU Xeon 6980P compute monster processor carries a substantial $17,800 price point. Intel's Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" family of processors appears to be its most expensive yet, with the flagship SKU now carrying more than a 50% price increase compared to the previous "Emerald Rapids" generation. However, the economics of computing are more nuanced than simple comparisons. While the last generation Emerald Rapids Xeon 8592+ (64 cores, 128 threads) cost about $181 per core, the new Granite Rapids Xeon 6980P comes in at approximately $139 per core, offering faster cores at a lower per-core cost.
The economics of data centers aren't always tied to the cost of a single product. When building total cost of ownership models, factors such as power consumption, compute density, and performance impact the final assessment. Even with the higher price of this flagship Granite Rapids Xeon processor, the economics of data center deployment may work in its favor. Customers get more cores in a single package, increasing density and driving down cost-per-core per system. This also improves operational efficiency, which is crucial considering that operating expenses account for about 10% of data center costs.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The economics of data centers aren't always tied to the cost of a single product. When building total cost of ownership models, factors such as power consumption, compute density, and performance impact the final assessment. Even with the higher price of this flagship Granite Rapids Xeon processor, the economics of data center deployment may work in its favor. Customers get more cores in a single package, increasing density and driving down cost-per-core per system. This also improves operational efficiency, which is crucial considering that operating expenses account for about 10% of data center costs.
44 Comments on Intel's Flagship 128-Core Xeon 6980P Processor Sets Record $17,800 Flagship Price
Watch what they are taking from us!
Gigaherz, what country are you from? Perhaps you meant that in another way that I wasn't following?
*intel doesn't really do those anymore
And besides the above; you don't even want these chips for regular work or gaming, they'll perform extremely subpar. A simple mid range CPU will smack it around in games :)
www.anandtech.com/show/14182/hands-on-with-the-56core-xeon-platinum-9200-cpu-intels-biggest-cpu-package-ever
“Pricing for this family of processors is not expected to be disclosed. Intel has stated that as they are selling these chips as part of barebones servers to OEMs that they will unlikely partition out the list pricing of the parts, and expect OEMs to cost them appropriately. Given that the new high-end Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L, with 28 cores and support for 4.5 TB of memory, runs just shy of ~$18k, we might see the top Xeon Platinum 9282 be anywhere from $25k to $50k, based on Intel margins, OEM margins, and markup.”
Real prices are probably substantially lower.
Edit: Found some listings around $8,000 so it is less than half the price of this...
In Phoronix testing the Xeon beats both Epycs in nearly every workload, usually by a wide margin. Last-generation Epyc isn't going to present strong competition, but the upcoming Zen 5 Epycs should do pretty well.
www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-performance/11
Xeon Specs: www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/xeon-6980p.c3862
Epyc 9754 Specs: www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/epyc-9754.c3257
Epyc 9684X Specs: www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/epyc-9684x.c3253
How much is the highest full-core count Opteron^H^H^HEPYC?
www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6980p-power
Taking the geomean bergamo is much, much more efficient, on an older node and without AMX. It is also priced much, much lower. I don't believe the current epyc generation to be weak competition.
I don't understand the power efficiency graphs on Phoronix, but plucking a the apparent averages from the Sierra Forest review summary, it appears that Sierra Forest is 10% more power efficient than Bergamo. I'm sure there's some overlap but I think a lot of prospective Bergamo customers are cross-shopping with Sierra Forest and Genoa customers are comparing it to Granite Rapids.
Also somewhere—probably on Serve the Home—it was said that most of the time these server processors will be run under a 25-50% load. So far I haven't seen any power efficiency tests under those conditions.
The last digit in the epyc model number designates the generation, if it ends in 4 it is zen4.Depending on the workload yes, sierra forest is really good. Granite ridge is also extremely good with AMX.
For the power efficiency it also depends on the workload, but if you go to the last page you find the geomean of all tests. In the article I linked it has both a performance geomean table and a power geomean table.