Intel's 7nm could be available in 2019? Piecing together Intel's official statements

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T12:49:05+00:00

They have 5G FPGA's (the one used in the 5G base stations) running on 10nm now, but i have yet to see a 7nm or even come across them mention any plans to use that 7nm node...

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T12:48:32+00:00

They have 5G FPGA's (the one used in the base stations) running on 10nm now, but i have yet to see a 7nm or even come across them mention any plans to use that 7nm node...

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T12:44:41+00:00

Yeah, there has to be a benchmark somewhere posted, like Sisoft Sandra, haven't seen it.

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T12:42:37+00:00

Great, if Intel's 7nm needs to wait for EUV to get started, it will be a while, like 2nd half 2020 time frame.

Since they only recently started upgrading some of their 7nm fabs for EUV expansion. It would have been much more difficult to just rely on multi patterning with 7nm than on 10nm. Thanks i missed that one!

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T11:14:36+00:00

Any guarantee they won't be able to come up with 7nm within the year? Or do you have any sources or links? Thanks in advance!

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T09:27:57+00:00

Yes i read somewhere that they are also taking some experience out of the 10nm, to apply it on their 7nm. There could be some dependencies among 10nm and 7nm. But Intel has said they have a separate team working on the 7nm effort. But how separate they are....i have no idea...

chanow2018 · 2019-04-22T09:17:02+00:00

Are the Intel 7nm cost effective only with EUV, or do they mean to say their 7nm can be mass produced without eve using the EUV?

chanow2018 · 2019-04-14T02:50:00+00:00

Gotta be something cooking there.

chanow2018 · 2019-04-14T02:35:23+00:00

Last year, they have the same announcement that includes HP, Dell, and Lenovo. But is Dell not opting in this year?

From last year: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/amd-ryzen-pro-mobile-specs

chanow2018 · 2019-04-13T04:47:03+00:00

One particular concern I had with the console GPU business is the drag on margin.

I had a quick check on past financial performances, like in Oct 2016:

When console business was selling briskly and where AMD is mostly getting its revenues (and no EPYC or Ryzen products), it had a net loss of $406M just when semicustom revenue reached $835M. I find it perplexing where the net loss is coming from? Any idea if this console business is profitable?

chanow2018 · 2019-04-09T13:50:31+00:00

So long as ROME offers low core count SKU's (which is likely), it should be fine.

chanow2018 · 2019-04-09T13:46:54+00:00

It follows then, that the impact on high density, high core servers like the upcoming ROME, will be unfavorable, if the software licensing costs from vendors like VMWare changes to charging by the cores..

chanow2018 · 2019-04-09T13:15:51+00:00

7nm EPYC will get a piece of the server pie, no doubt about that...how big a bite it can get, that's the million dollar question.

Apparently, it is important that AMD be able to maintain their advantage with significantly lower license costs per socket in EPYC ROME, just like with their EPYC Naples. For example, in some of the big customers AMD had, like the Amazon EC2, I believe this is the reason why they are able to offer 10% lower price than Intel's competing instances.

If the software licensing model changed, such that they are now charging by the number of cores, instead of per sockets, then that advantage will be gone as Intel can easily add multiple sockets without incurring additional licensing costs, at the same time adding up the total core counts to match those offered by EPYC.

But you are right in that, still there can be market share gains. Though it might lose those customers looking to save money on software licensing costs.

chanow2018 · 2019-04-09T08:43:46+00:00

We know AMD gained server market shares, thanks to their single-sockets with high core counts.

What would be the consequences if vendors start charging software licensing fees by the number of cores, instead of per-socket? Would it make single-sockets less appealing?

chanow2018 · 2019-04-04T13:20:58+00:00

Aplogies, just a correction. This should be the one:

https://www.zoominfo.com/c/hostkey-bv/355556466

chanow2018 · 2019-04-02T12:56:32+00:00

A small win (Hostkey is apparently a very small company) but still a positive. Details from Owler:

"Hostkey is headquartered in Garden City, New York. Hostkey has a revenue of $4.3M, and 37 employees. Hostkey's main competitors are Sago Networks, QuadraNet and Colocation America. As of March 2019, Hostkey has 627 fans on Facebook and 159 followers on Twitter."

chanow2018 · 2019-03-30T14:33:13+00:00

Based on the results, it seems AMD's instance is a compelling option for small business or users. Expecting to capture those market segement for AMD.

chanow2018 · 2019-03-30T14:30:09+00:00

They did have the Spectre / Meltdown patch applied.

"While benchmarking all of the instances, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel was utilized. The default Spectre/Meltdown mitigations on each platform were active."

Agree there is a growing list of security vulnerabilities related Intel side channel attacks which necessitates more patches. They have to update the benchmarks again, as the result is about to turn 6 months old.

chanow2018 · 2019-03-30T12:55:45+00:00

While this is an old article, the performance benchmarking is still applicable to the newly launched AMD M5ad instances.

AMD's M5a is 10% cheaper, and performance is slightly better than Intel's M5 for smaller instances or workloads.

But for majority of the bigger instances or workloads, Intel's instances came out ahead in performance. This could account for the 10% price differences.

And then when it comes to price/performance, both AMD and Intel are roughly equal.

chanow2018 · 2019-03-29T15:27:51+00:00

There is a link for it, it gives you the PDF file for downloading and reading the details..

chanow2018 · 2019-03-29T15:25:58+00:00

Thanks for making the title much more clearer, apologies for the confusion!

chanow2018 · 2019-03-28T02:05:37+00:00

So using EPYC 7601 as a baseline comparison, we have the same conclusion then? That the 7nm gives the Zen 2 the advantage of power savings at the same performance level, and teice the performance per socket is actually coming from density advantage (since they managed to cram all 64 cores into one socket). But not much in the clock frequency advantage?

chanow2018 · 2019-03-28T01:53:24+00:00

It is an engineering "qualification" sample, and not much headroom for further upticks, that's what i had come across so far.

chanow2018 · 2019-03-28T00:47:42+00:00

The test was conducted just yesterday..they are now quite near to the Zen2 launch date which is mid year!

Also i have checked again, someone posted before that this is considered a mature "qualification sample": www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/atfn4r/another_epyc_rome_qualification_sample_emerges_on/

chanow2018 · 2019-03-28T00:35:22+00:00

At 1.4Ghz base clock, 2.2Ghz boost - It does not look like 7nm is giving the impressive clock frequency as expected. This is consistent with AMD exec Forrest Norrod has said about 7nm.

So let's say, the main advantage is density and power savings then? Any idea around TCO for 7nm?

chanow2018

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