13 ms·

Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon

301 points by vanburen 7mo ago

bergheim 7mo ago
Yeah this is their make or break moment. Because if this is not thunder Intel will default. I promise you. Heard it from some youtuber as well, trust me.
9cb14c1ec0 7mo ago
One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
- Tepix 7mo ago
  Do you remember what you dreamed about 7 years ago? An Ampere Altra 80-core-CPU was sold for less than 210€ on eBay in January.
  - mort96 7mo ago
    Oh, nice! I always wanted one of those, a many-core build server running ARM would be excellent for Yocto. Anything running in quemu in the rootfs is so slow on x86 and I've seen the rootfs postprocess step take a long time. Though... these days, getting enough RAM to support builds across 80 cores would be twice the price of the whole rest of the system I'm guessing.
- SecretDreams 7mo ago
  > with proportional RAM and storage Let's not get carried away here
- epistasis 7mo ago
  Some of the AMD offerings like this on Ebay are pretty close to affordable! It's the RAM that's killer these days... I still regret not buying 1TB of RAM back in ~October...
  - mort96 7mo ago
    I bought a bundle with 512GB of RAM and an older 24-core EPYC (7F72) + supermicro motherboard on ebay a bit over a year ago, it was really an amazing deal and has made for a truly nice NAS. If you're okay with stuff that's old enough that you can buy decommissioned server stuff, you can get really high-quality gear at surprisingly low prices. Companies decommission hardware on a schedule after all, not when it stops working. EDIT: Though looking for similar deals now, I can only find ones up to 128GB RAM and they're near twice the price I paid. I got 7F72 + motherboard + 512GB DDR4 for $1488 (uh, I swear that's what I paid, $1488.03. Didn't notice the 1488 before.) The closest I can find now is 7F72 + motherboard + 128GB DDR4 for over $2500. That's awful
    - jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
      AMD also has some weird cpus like the 7c13 7r13, that are way way way below their normal price bands. You don't even have to buy used to get a ridiculous systems... Until 4 months ago (RIP ram prices). https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly-cheap-and-good-cpu/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly...
    - epistasis 7mo ago
      RAM! (And NAND SSDs too now, probably...) When I was looking in October, I hadn't bought hardware for the better part of a decade, and I saw all these older posts on forums for DDR4 at $1/GB, but the lowest I could find was at least $2/GB used. These days? HAH! If I had a decent sales channel I might be speculating on DDR4/DDR5 RAM and holding it because I expect prices to climb even higher in the coming months.
      - fc417fc802 7mo ago
        I don't remember DDR4 ever hitting $1/GB. Was I not shopping in the right places? IIRC DDR3 settled in at $1/GB quite a long time ago and recycled datacenter DDR4 was maybe ballpark $2.50/GB at some point.
        7mo ago
- fred_is_fred 7mo ago
  This is the 2026 version of "I need a beowulf cluster of these".
  - TheCondor 7mo ago
    ‘Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these’
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  Wait long enough and these will be cheap on eBay. By that point we'll be desiring the new 1000 core count CPUs though.
- hagbard_c 7mo ago
  Just give it a few years and you'll be able to buy the thing for a fraction of the 'current' price. By that time it will be considered to be 'slow' and 'power-hungry' and people will wonder why you're intent on running older hardware but it'll still work just fine. The DL380 G7 under the stairs here also used to cost an arm and a leg while I got it for some finger nail clippings.
- cmxch 7mo ago
  Aside from the memory cost being exorbitant, 4th/5th gen ES CPUs aren’t horribly expensive for the core count you get. 8480s and 8592s have been quite accessible. Stuffed an 8480+ ES with 192gb of memory across 8 channels and it’s actually not too bad.
rubyn00bie 7mo ago
I’ve not kept up with Intel in a while, but one thing that stood out to me is these are all E cores— meaning no hyperthreading. Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications? Also does anyone know if there have been any benchmarks against AMDs 192 core Epyc CPU?
- re-thc 7mo ago
  It's a trade off. Hyperthreading takes up space on the die and the power budget. As to E core itself - it's ARM's playbook.
- Analemma_ 7mo ago
  It all depends on your exact workload, and I’ll wait to see benchmarks before making any confident claims, but in general if you have two threads of execution which are fine on an E-core, it’s better to actually put them on two E-cores than one hyperthreaded P-core.
- MengerSponge 7mo ago
  I don't know the nitty-gritty of why, but some compute intensive tasks don't benefit from hyperthreading. If the processor is destined for those tasks, you may as well use that silicon for something actually useful. https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1096 https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1096
  - bgnn 7mo ago
    Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth. Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best
  - to11mtm 7mo ago
    It's a few things; mostly along the lines of data caching (i.e. hyper threading may mean that other thread needs a cache sync/barrier/etc). That said I'll point to the Intel Atom - the first version and refresh were an 'in-order' where hyper-threading was the cheapest option (both silicon and power-wise) to provide performance, however with Silvermont they switched to OOO execution but ditched hyper threading.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
stego-tech 7mo ago
These sorts of core-density increases are how I win cloud debates in an org. * Identify the workloads that haven't scaled in a year. Your ERPs, your HRIS, your dev/stage/test environments, DBs, Microsoft estate, core infrastructure, etc. (EDIT, from zbentley: also identify any cross-system processing where data will transfer from the cloud back to your private estate to be excluded, so you don't get murdered with egress charges) * Run the cost analysis of reserved instances in AWS/Azure/GCP for those workloads over three years * Do the same for one of these high-core "pizza boxes", but amortized over seven years * Realize the savings to be had moving "fixed infra" back on-premises or into a colo versus sticking with a public cloud provider Seriously, what took a full rack or two of 2U dual-socket servers just a decade ago can be replaced with three 2U boxes with full HA/clustering. It's insane. Back in the late '10s, I made a case to my org at the time that a global hypervisor hardware refresh and accompanying VMware licenses would have an ROI of 2.5yrs versus comparable AWS infrastructure, even assuming a 50% YoY rate of license inflation (this was pre-Broadcom; nowadays, I'd be eyeballing Nutanix, Virtuozzo, Apache Cloudstack, or yes, even Proxmox, assuming we weren't already a Microsoft shop w/ Hyper-V) - and give us an additional 20% headroom to boot. The only thing giving me pause on that argument today is the current RAM/NAND shortage, but even that's (hopefully) temporary - and doesn't hurt the orgs who built around a longer timeline with the option for an additional support runway (like the three-year extended support contracts available through VARs). If we can't bill a customer for it, and it's not scaling regularly, then it shouldn't be in the public cloud. That's my take, anyway. It sucks the wind from the sails of folks gung-ho on the "fringe benefits" of public cloud spend (box seats, junkets, conference tickets, etc...), but the finance teams tend to love such clear numbers.
- zbentley 7mo ago
  That’s definitely the right call in some cases. But as soon as there’s any high-interconnect-rate system that has to be in cloud (appliances with locked in cloud billing contracts, compute that does need to elastically scale and talks to your DB’s pizza box, edge/CDN/cache services with lots of fallthrough to sources of truth on-prem), the cloud bandwidth costs start to kill you. I’ve had success with this approach by keeping it to only the business process management stacks (CRMs, AD, and so on—examples just like the ones you listed). But as soon as there’s any need for bridging cloud/onprem for any data rate beyond “cronned sync” or “metadata only”, it starts to hurt a lot sooner than you’d expect, I’ve found.
renewiltord 7mo ago
Core density plus power makes so many things worthwhile. Generally human cost of managing hardware scales with number of components under management. CPUs very reliable. So once you get lots of CPU and RAM on single machine you can run with very few. But right pricing hardware is hard if you’re small shop. My mind is hard-locked onto Epyc processors without thought. 9755 on eBay is cheap as balls. Infinity cores! Problem with hardware is lead time etc. cloud can spin up immediately. Great for experimentation. Organizationally useful. If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product. But if you’re small shop having some Kubernetes on rack is maybe $15k one time and $1.2k on going per month. Very cheap and you get lots and lots of compute! Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up. Still, foolish to do on prem by default perhaps (now that I think about it): if you have cloud egress you’re dead, compliance story requires interconnect to be well designed. More complicated than just basics. You need to know a little before it makes sense. Feel like reasoning LLM. I now have opposite position.
- PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  > Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up. Last time I tried to do anything networking with Claude it set up route preference in opposite order (it thought lower number means more preferred, while it was opposite), fucking it up completely, and then invented config commands that do not exist in BIRD (routing software suite). Then I looked at 2 different AIs and they both hallucinated same BIRD config commands that were nonexistent. And by same I mean they hallucinated existence of same feature. > If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product. The time of having to order a bunch of servers for new project is long over. We just spun k8s cluster for devs to self-service themselves and the prod clusters just have a bit of accounting shim so adding new namespace have to be assigned to a certain project so we can bill client for it. Also you're allowed to use cloud services while you have on-prem infrastructure. You get best of both, with some cognition cost involved.
benj111 7mo ago
Am I the only one disappointed they didn't settle for 286 cores?
- kissiel 7mo ago
  At least you got the Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor 386H :)
- hedora 7mo ago
  I wonder if they can bin out ones that have a dead core or two specifically for this purpose.
- soganess 7mo ago
  During the 8th gen they made an i7-8086... Hopefully Intel hasn't fired that person.
  - boltzmann-brain 7mo ago
    8086K, actually. I still run one inside one of my PCs!
urthor 7mo ago
So TLDR is it competitive? What are the dimensions and dynamics here vs EPYC?
- aliljet 7mo ago
  This is really what I want to understand. Where can we see real world performance benchmarks?
  - wmf 7mo ago
    Phoronix should have them soon. Or if they don't it means the performance is bad.
- user5994461 7mo ago
  Not competitive at all. It's easily visible on the laptop lines, where the same GPU manufactured on TSMC has 3 times the power/performance ratio compared to the Intel one. Putting more cores is just another desperate move to play the benchmark. Power is roughly quadratic with frequency, every time you fall behind competition, you can double the number of cores and reduce the frequency by 1.414 to compensate. Repeat a few times and you get CPU with hundreds of cores, but each core is so slow it can hardly do any work.
  - icegreentea2 7mo ago
    ??? GPU vs CPU workloads are completely different. Comparing Panther Lake iGPU vs Ryzen iGPU is not going to tell you much about how high density server CPU performance will work out. The Panther Lake vs Ryzen laptop performance comparisons show that Pather Lake does well, basically trading against top end Ryzen AI laptop chips in both absolute performance, and performance per watt.
    - user5994461 7mo ago
      If you're not aware, Intel has released a lineup of laptops, with some models having the GPU made by them and some having the same GPU made by TSMC. That makes the comparison very direct. TSMC can deliver nearly 3 times the power/performance. GPU and CPU manufacturing is the same thing, same node, same result. GPU is always maximizing perf/power ratio because it's embarrassingly parallel, leaving no room to game the benchmark. CPU can be gamed by having a single fast core, that drops performance in half as soon as you use another core.
NoNameHaveI 7mo ago
As a Yocto enthusiast, I am curious as to how much elapsed realtime would be needed for a clean Yocto build. Yocto is thread heavy, so with 288, it oughta be good.
- foxglacier 7mo ago
  As a fellow yocto enthusiast, I think they should call the process node 1.8e15 ym instead of the stupid legacy Angstrom unit.
- overfeed 7mo ago
  My Yocto build times on a 32-core AMD are negligible, <2 minutes for a full distro, IIRC. I suspect higher core counts have diminishing returns, especially since most dev builds are heavily cached.
50lo 7mo ago
With packages like this (lots of cores, multi-chip packaging, lots of memory channels), the architecture is increasingly a small cluster on a package rather than a monolithic CPU. I wonder whether the next bottleneck becomes software scheduling rather than silicon - OS/runtimes weren’t really designed with hundreds of cores and complex interconnect topologies in mind.
- whateverboat 7mo ago
  I think linux can handle upto 1024 cores just fine.
  - zokier 7mo ago
    afaik the mainline limit is 4096 threads. HP sells server with 32 sockets x 60 cores/socket x 2 threads/core = 3840 threads, so we are pretty close to that limit.
    - Retr0id 7mo ago
      I had no idea we had socket counts so high, do you know where I could find a picture of one?
      - to11mtm 7mo ago
        Sounds like a HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200, but again keep in mind that's something where there's probably a fabric between nodes one way or another.
      - zokier 7mo ago
        It's bit cheating because it's cluster based system: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50004268enw https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50004268enw So 4 sockets per chassis, up to 8 chassis in a complete system. Afaik OS sees it as single huge system, that is kinda their special sauce here.
        7mo ago
iberator 7mo ago
Why do you needs so many cores for? Apache threads? Any old school wizard here?
- andriy_koval 7mo ago
  data processing
  - lysace 7mo ago
    As opposed to?
    - andriy_koval 7mo ago
      OP asked why one would need so many cores, I answered: data processing. Sorry, not sure I am following your question.
- whateverboat 7mo ago
  Host it in proxxmox, run 8 different services on it each with 32 cores.
- Tepix 7mo ago
  Yeah, virtualization, many (small) containers / VMs.
- toast0 7mo ago
  I used to run many hosts with 28 cores per host. If performance scales, it's nicer to have a few 288 core hosts rather than a few hundred 28 core hosts. Getting the performance to scale can be hard, of course. The less inter-core communication the better. Things that tend to work well are either stuff where a bunch of data comes in and a single thread works on it for a significant amount of time then ships the result or things where you can rely on the NIC(s) to split traffic and you can process the network queue for a connecrion on the same core that handles the userspace stuff (see Receive Side Scaling), but you need a fancy NIC to have 288 network queues.
- 7mo ago
hedora 7mo ago
So, they're selling this as an AI accelerator, with drop in compatibility with existing boards, and no boost to RAM bandwidth. As I understand things, it would be extremely unusual to ship a chip that was bound by floating point throughput, not uncached memory access, especially in the desktop/laptop space. I haven't been following the Intel server space too carefully, so it's an honest question: Was the old thing compute and not bandwidth limited, or is this going to be running inference at the same throughput (though maybe with lower power consumption)?
- Tepix 7mo ago
  No, they're not selling this as an "AI accelerator": Here is the quote: "The company says operators deploying 5G Advanced and future 6G networks increasingly rely on server CPUs for virtualized RAN and edge AI inference, as they do not want to re-architect their data centers in a bid to accommodate AI accelerators." Edge AI usually means very small models that run fine on CPUs.
  - hedora 7mo ago
    A very small model is going to be, what, 8GB? That'll easily blow through the caches. You're going to end up bottlenecked on DRAM either way. So, I wonder if this is going to be any faster than the previous generation for edge AI.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      Perhaps instead of posting erroneous assertions to HN you could wander over to your LLM of choice and ask it something along the lines of: What are some examples of edge AI applications that achieve good performance on a CPU where memory bandwidth is severely limited compared to a GPU? Please link to publicly available models where possible.
      - hedora 7mo ago
        I run AI applications all the time in exactly those situations. The models range from 2GB (vector models) 30GB (small LLMs) to 100GB (medium LLMs). None of those fit in 4MB of cache (the per-core on this part), or 1GB (the aggregate cache). What AI models are you actually talking about? Do you mean old-school ML stuff, like decision trees or high dimensional indexes? No one I know calls those "AI", which is generally reserved for big-ish neural networks.
bigbuppo 7mo ago
Meanwhile, somebody put 8192 arm cores on a chip and ran a risc-v emulator on top of that which emulated a 6502 which then emulated a 288 core xeon and it used 0.01% of the power and outperformed the Intel chip in every other metric 10:1, probably.
- jvanderbot 7mo ago
  You know, a link would be great for this comment.
  - CoastalCoder 7mo ago
    Too risky.
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    https://theonion.com https://theonion.com, probably
    - bigbuppo 7mo ago
      Ah, nice to see a fellow lover of the finest news publication on the planet.
  - throwaway11456 7mo ago
    Well Linux was booted on an Intel 4004, emulating a MIPS R3000. Looks like it booted in 4.76 days. I don't believe this article was AI fabricated. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-on-intels-first-ever-cpu/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-o...
    - DetroitThrow 7mo ago
      Somehow, that still doesn't sound real, but it looks like it is. Wow. Though that one was written by their recently fired hallucination writer.
- ilaksh 7mo ago
Sweepi 7mo ago
if 18A is Intel's make-or-break, its a break. Their next node looks promising.
boltzmann-brain 7mo ago
Helped a friend make a difficult career decision (cozy job vs something hard and new + moving to a new city) that ultimately ended up with him working on the project. Glad that happened. I love to see people grow.
O5vYtytb 7mo ago
Sure looks like a lot of glue holding that CPU together :)
- s3p 7mo ago
  As soon as I read chiplets I thought about this too! Glad even intel agrees that chiplet architecture is the way forward.
avhception 7mo ago
A bad moment to have a make-or-break moment for your CPU business - a lot of customers will probably hold off purchases right now because of the RAM prices, no matter how good your CPU might be.
- winwang 7mo ago
  If you have enough cores, you could pool the L1 together for makeshift RAM!
- skyberrys 7mo ago
  Isn't this new server CPU a drop in replacement though? So the DC could pull off the old CPU, drop in the new one and not touch the existing RAM setup, yet be able to deliver better performance within the limits of the existing RAM. Then once RAM prices drop (okay that might be a while) separately upgrade the RAM at a different time.
  - to11mtm 7mo ago
    That's semi-dependent on supplier arrangements; i.e. lots of shops won't want to upgrade CPUs on a server out of fear that they can't get support later; sometimes that's justified by contract, sometimes it's not.
- tempaccount5050 7mo ago
  In my experience, RAM costs will have very little impact on businesses buying servers. When we buy is pretty much set by contract and warranty cycles.
andreadev 7mo ago
I think everyone's focusing on the core count, but the packaging story is way more interesting here. This thing is 12 separate chiplets on 18A stacked on base dies made on Intel 3, connected to I/O tiles on Intel 7. Three different process nodes in one package, shipping at volume. That's nuts. And it's clearly an IFS play too. Intel Foundry needs a proof point — you can publish PDKs all day, but nothing sells foundry credibility like eating your own cooking in a 288-core server part at 450W. If Foveros Direct works here, it's the best ad Intel could run for potential foundry customers. The chiplet sizing is smart for another reason nobody's mentioned: yield. 18A is brand new, yields are probably rough. But 24 cores per die is small enough that even bad yields give you enough good chiplets. Basically AMD's Zen playbook but with a 3D twist. Also — 64 CXL 2.0 lanes! Several comments here are complaining about DDR5 prices, which is fair. But CXL memory pooling across a rack could change that math completely. I wonder if Intel is betting the real value isn't the cores but being the best CXL hub in the datacenter. The ARM competition is still the elephant in the room though. "Many efficient cores" is what ARM has always done natively, and 17% IPC uplift on Darkmont doesn't close that gap by itself.
- Dunedan 7mo ago
  > 18A is brand new, yields are probably rough. That the CPU cores are low frequency cores probably helps with yield as well.
  - epolanski 7mo ago
    Are the two things related?
- nsteel 7mo ago
  Agree entirely with your take. The packaging story is awesome, I wish there were more details on the stacking used on this one. But I am at a loss to how Intel are really going to get any traction with IFS. How can anyone trust Intel as a long-term foundry partner. Even if they priced it more aggressively, the opportunity cost in picking a supplier who decides to quit next year would be catastrophic for many. The only way this works is if they practically give their services away to someone big, who can afford to take that risk and can also make it worth Intel's continued investment. Any ideas who that would be, I've got nothing.
bee_rider 7mo ago
I don’t quite follow: > From a cache hierarchy standpoint, the design groups cores into four-core blocks that share approximately 4 MB of L2 cache per block. As a result, the aggregate last-level cache across the full package surpasses 1 GB, roughly 1,152 MB in total. If cores are grouped into four-core blocks, and each block has 4MB of cache… isn’t that just 1MB per core? So 288MB total? HotHardware reports https://hothardware.com/news/intel-clearwater-forest-xeon-6-plus-launch https://hothardware.com/news/intel-clearwater-forest-xeon-6-... > these processors pack in up to 288 of the little guys as well as 576MB of last-level cache, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 12-channel DDR5-8000. > The Xeon 6+ processors each have up to 12 compute tiles fabbed on 18A, all of which have six quad-core modules for a total of 24 cores per tile. There are also three 'active' base tiles on Intel 3, so-called because the base tiles include 192MB of last-level cache, which is so-called because each compute tile has 48MB of L3 cache. So maybe 1MB per core L2, then 192MB of basically-L4 per base tile, then 48MB of L3 per compute tile? 192*3+48*12 gets me to the 1152, maybe that’s it. Anyway, apparently these things will have “AMX” matrix extensions. I wonder if they’ll be good number crunchers.
gregw2 7mo ago
Where's my new AWS Redshift instance with this? Been stuck on ra3 for 5 years now...
midtake 7mo ago
I honestly just want Intel to fail. I believe they have done more anticompetitive harm than good these past years. Datacenter needs to move to ARM so Intel can finally go home.
mikelitoris 7mo ago
More Intel vaporware. Seriously, their other 18A product, panther lake, supposedly "launched" January 18th. It's been 1.5 months and I still can't go and buy any panther lake laptop except from dell.com. Why are they like this? I'll believe it when I see it. Also about "make-or-break": they've been saying this for all of Intel's products since at least 2022 *yawn*
- stinkbeetle 7mo ago
  AFAIKS there are 18A laptops from Lenovo and HP for the first two I checked. Or do you mean if you click through and buy one it gets put on some indeterminate backorder?
  - mikelitoris 7mo ago
    link?
    - stinkbeetle 7mo ago
      https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-slim-series/lenovo-yoga-slim-7i-ultra-gen-11-aura-edition-14-inch-intel/len101y0064 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-slim-series... https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-series/lenovo-ideapad-slim-5i-gen-11-16-inch-intel-laptop/83s6cto1wwus1 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-... EDIT: Changed the lenovo link to a non-preorder laptop (was https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-next-gen-ai-14-kd0047nr https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-n...)
      - lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
        “Preorder”
        stinkbeetle 7mo ago
        Oh, there are so many lenovo ones I just picked one at random and didn't notice it said preorder. The HP link doesn't say that though, right? Here's another lenovo one that doesn't say preorder. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-series/lenovo-ideapad-slim-5i-gen-11-16-inch-intel-laptop/83s6cto1wwus1 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-...
StacyRawls 6mo ago
[dead]

301 points by vanburen 7mo ago

Yeah this is their make or break moment. Because if this is not thunder Intel will default. I promise you. Heard it from some youtuber as well, trust me.

9cb14c1ec0 7mo ago

One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.

Tepix 7mo ago
Do you remember what you dreamed about 7 years ago? An Ampere Altra 80-core-CPU was sold for less than 210€ on eBay in January.
- mort96 7mo ago
  Oh, nice! I always wanted one of those, a many-core build server running ARM would be excellent for Yocto. Anything running in quemu in the rootfs is so slow on x86 and I've seen the rootfs postprocess step take a long time. Though... these days, getting enough RAM to support builds across 80 cores would be twice the price of the whole rest of the system I'm guessing.
SecretDreams 7mo ago
> with proportional RAM and storage Let's not get carried away here
epistasis 7mo ago
Some of the AMD offerings like this on Ebay are pretty close to affordable! It's the RAM that's killer these days... I still regret not buying 1TB of RAM back in ~October...
- mort96 7mo ago
  I bought a bundle with 512GB of RAM and an older 24-core EPYC (7F72) + supermicro motherboard on ebay a bit over a year ago, it was really an amazing deal and has made for a truly nice NAS. If you're okay with stuff that's old enough that you can buy decommissioned server stuff, you can get really high-quality gear at surprisingly low prices. Companies decommission hardware on a schedule after all, not when it stops working. EDIT: Though looking for similar deals now, I can only find ones up to 128GB RAM and they're near twice the price I paid. I got 7F72 + motherboard + 512GB DDR4 for $1488 (uh, I swear that's what I paid, $1488.03. Didn't notice the 1488 before.) The closest I can find now is 7F72 + motherboard + 128GB DDR4 for over $2500. That's awful
  - jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
    AMD also has some weird cpus like the 7c13 7r13, that are way way way below their normal price bands. You don't even have to buy used to get a ridiculous systems... Until 4 months ago (RIP ram prices). https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly-cheap-and-good-cpu/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly...
  - epistasis 7mo ago
    RAM! (And NAND SSDs too now, probably...) When I was looking in October, I hadn't bought hardware for the better part of a decade, and I saw all these older posts on forums for DDR4 at $1/GB, but the lowest I could find was at least $2/GB used. These days? HAH! If I had a decent sales channel I might be speculating on DDR4/DDR5 RAM and holding it because I expect prices to climb even higher in the coming months.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      I don't remember DDR4 ever hitting $1/GB. Was I not shopping in the right places? IIRC DDR3 settled in at $1/GB quite a long time ago and recycled datacenter DDR4 was maybe ballpark $2.50/GB at some point.
      - 7mo ago
fred_is_fred 7mo ago
This is the 2026 version of "I need a beowulf cluster of these".
- TheCondor 7mo ago
  ‘Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these’
Aurornis 7mo ago
Wait long enough and these will be cheap on eBay. By that point we'll be desiring the new 1000 core count CPUs though.
hagbard_c 7mo ago
Just give it a few years and you'll be able to buy the thing for a fraction of the 'current' price. By that time it will be considered to be 'slow' and 'power-hungry' and people will wonder why you're intent on running older hardware but it'll still work just fine. The DL380 G7 under the stairs here also used to cost an arm and a leg while I got it for some finger nail clippings.
cmxch 7mo ago
Aside from the memory cost being exorbitant, 4th/5th gen ES CPUs aren’t horribly expensive for the core count you get. 8480s and 8592s have been quite accessible. Stuffed an 8480+ ES with 192gb of memory across 8 channels and it’s actually not too bad.

rubyn00bie 7mo ago

I’ve not kept up with Intel in a while, but one thing that stood out to me is these are all E cores— meaning no hyperthreading. Is something like this competitive, or preferred, in certain applications? Also does anyone know if there have been any benchmarks against AMDs 192 core Epyc CPU?

re-thc 7mo ago
It's a trade off. Hyperthreading takes up space on the die and the power budget. As to E core itself - it's ARM's playbook.
Analemma_ 7mo ago
It all depends on your exact workload, and I’ll wait to see benchmarks before making any confident claims, but in general if you have two threads of execution which are fine on an E-core, it’s better to actually put them on two E-cores than one hyperthreaded P-core.
MengerSponge 7mo ago
I don't know the nitty-gritty of why, but some compute intensive tasks don't benefit from hyperthreading. If the processor is destined for those tasks, you may as well use that silicon for something actually useful. https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1096 https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1096
- bgnn 7mo ago
  Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth. Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best
- to11mtm 7mo ago
  It's a few things; mostly along the lines of data caching (i.e. hyper threading may mean that other thread needs a cache sync/barrier/etc). That said I'll point to the Intel Atom - the first version and refresh were an 'in-order' where hyper-threading was the cheapest option (both silicon and power-wise) to provide performance, however with Silvermont they switched to OOO execution but ditched hyper threading.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

stego-tech 7mo ago

These sorts of core-density increases are how I win cloud debates in an org. * Identify the workloads that haven't scaled in a year. Your ERPs, your HRIS, your dev/stage/test environments, DBs, Microsoft estate, core infrastructure, etc. (EDIT, from zbentley: also identify any cross-system processing where data will transfer from the cloud back to your private estate to be excluded, so you don't get murdered with egress charges) * Run the cost analysis of reserved instances in AWS/Azure/GCP for those workloads over three years * Do the same for one of these high-core "pizza boxes", but amortized over seven years * Realize the savings to be had moving "fixed infra" back on-premises or into a colo versus sticking with a public cloud provider Seriously, what took a full rack or two of 2U dual-socket servers just a decade ago can be replaced with three 2U boxes with full HA/clustering. It's insane. Back in the late '10s, I made a case to my org at the time that a global hypervisor hardware refresh and accompanying VMware licenses would have an ROI of 2.5yrs versus comparable AWS infrastructure, even assuming a 50% YoY rate of license inflation (this was pre-Broadcom; nowadays, I'd be eyeballing Nutanix, Virtuozzo, Apache Cloudstack, or yes, even Proxmox, assuming we weren't already a Microsoft shop w/ Hyper-V) - and give us an additional 20% headroom to boot. The only thing giving me pause on that argument today is the current RAM/NAND shortage, but even that's (hopefully) temporary - and doesn't hurt the orgs who built around a longer timeline with the option for an additional support runway (like the three-year extended support contracts available through VARs). If we can't bill a customer for it, and it's not scaling regularly, then it shouldn't be in the public cloud. That's my take, anyway. It sucks the wind from the sails of folks gung-ho on the "fringe benefits" of public cloud spend (box seats, junkets, conference tickets, etc...), but the finance teams tend to love such clear numbers.

zbentley 7mo ago
That’s definitely the right call in some cases. But as soon as there’s any high-interconnect-rate system that has to be in cloud (appliances with locked in cloud billing contracts, compute that does need to elastically scale and talks to your DB’s pizza box, edge/CDN/cache services with lots of fallthrough to sources of truth on-prem), the cloud bandwidth costs start to kill you. I’ve had success with this approach by keeping it to only the business process management stacks (CRMs, AD, and so on—examples just like the ones you listed). But as soon as there’s any need for bridging cloud/onprem for any data rate beyond “cronned sync” or “metadata only”, it starts to hurt a lot sooner than you’d expect, I’ve found.

renewiltord 7mo ago

Core density plus power makes so many things worthwhile. Generally human cost of managing hardware scales with number of components under management. CPUs very reliable. So once you get lots of CPU and RAM on single machine you can run with very few. But right pricing hardware is hard if you’re small shop. My mind is hard-locked onto Epyc processors without thought. 9755 on eBay is cheap as balls. Infinity cores! Problem with hardware is lead time etc. cloud can spin up immediately. Great for experimentation. Organizationally useful. If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product. But if you’re small shop having some Kubernetes on rack is maybe $15k one time and $1.2k on going per month. Very cheap and you get lots and lots of compute! Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up. Still, foolish to do on prem by default perhaps (now that I think about it): if you have cloud egress you’re dead, compliance story requires interconnect to be well designed. More complicated than just basics. You need to know a little before it makes sense. Feel like reasoning LLM. I now have opposite position.

PunchyHamster 7mo ago
> Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up. Last time I tried to do anything networking with Claude it set up route preference in opposite order (it thought lower number means more preferred, while it was opposite), fucking it up completely, and then invented config commands that do not exist in BIRD (routing software suite). Then I looked at 2 different AIs and they both hallucinated same BIRD config commands that were nonexistent. And by same I mean they hallucinated existence of same feature. > If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product. The time of having to order a bunch of servers for new project is long over. We just spun k8s cluster for devs to self-service themselves and the prod clusters just have a bit of accounting shim so adding new namespace have to be assigned to a certain project so we can bill client for it. Also you're allowed to use cloud services while you have on-prem infrastructure. You get best of both, with some cognition cost involved.

benj111 7mo ago

Am I the only one disappointed they didn't settle for 286 cores?

kissiel 7mo ago
At least you got the Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor 386H :)
hedora 7mo ago
I wonder if they can bin out ones that have a dead core or two specifically for this purpose.
soganess 7mo ago
During the 8th gen they made an i7-8086... Hopefully Intel hasn't fired that person.
- boltzmann-brain 7mo ago
  8086K, actually. I still run one inside one of my PCs!

urthor 7mo ago

So TLDR is it competitive? What are the dimensions and dynamics here vs EPYC?

aliljet 7mo ago
This is really what I want to understand. Where can we see real world performance benchmarks?
- wmf 7mo ago
  Phoronix should have them soon. Or if they don't it means the performance is bad.
user5994461 7mo ago
Not competitive at all. It's easily visible on the laptop lines, where the same GPU manufactured on TSMC has 3 times the power/performance ratio compared to the Intel one. Putting more cores is just another desperate move to play the benchmark. Power is roughly quadratic with frequency, every time you fall behind competition, you can double the number of cores and reduce the frequency by 1.414 to compensate. Repeat a few times and you get CPU with hundreds of cores, but each core is so slow it can hardly do any work.
- icegreentea2 7mo ago
  ??? GPU vs CPU workloads are completely different. Comparing Panther Lake iGPU vs Ryzen iGPU is not going to tell you much about how high density server CPU performance will work out. The Panther Lake vs Ryzen laptop performance comparisons show that Pather Lake does well, basically trading against top end Ryzen AI laptop chips in both absolute performance, and performance per watt.
  - user5994461 7mo ago
    If you're not aware, Intel has released a lineup of laptops, with some models having the GPU made by them and some having the same GPU made by TSMC. That makes the comparison very direct. TSMC can deliver nearly 3 times the power/performance. GPU and CPU manufacturing is the same thing, same node, same result. GPU is always maximizing perf/power ratio because it's embarrassingly parallel, leaving no room to game the benchmark. CPU can be gamed by having a single fast core, that drops performance in half as soon as you use another core.

NoNameHaveI 7mo ago

As a Yocto enthusiast, I am curious as to how much elapsed realtime would be needed for a clean Yocto build. Yocto is thread heavy, so with 288, it oughta be good.

foxglacier 7mo ago
As a fellow yocto enthusiast, I think they should call the process node 1.8e15 ym instead of the stupid legacy Angstrom unit.
overfeed 7mo ago
My Yocto build times on a 32-core AMD are negligible, <2 minutes for a full distro, IIRC. I suspect higher core counts have diminishing returns, especially since most dev builds are heavily cached.

50lo 7mo ago

With packages like this (lots of cores, multi-chip packaging, lots of memory channels), the architecture is increasingly a small cluster on a package rather than a monolithic CPU. I wonder whether the next bottleneck becomes software scheduling rather than silicon - OS/runtimes weren’t really designed with hundreds of cores and complex interconnect topologies in mind.

whateverboat 7mo ago
I think linux can handle upto 1024 cores just fine.
- zokier 7mo ago
  afaik the mainline limit is 4096 threads. HP sells server with 32 sockets x 60 cores/socket x 2 threads/core = 3840 threads, so we are pretty close to that limit.
  - Retr0id 7mo ago
    I had no idea we had socket counts so high, do you know where I could find a picture of one?
    - to11mtm 7mo ago
      Sounds like a HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200, but again keep in mind that's something where there's probably a fabric between nodes one way or another.
    - zokier 7mo ago
      It's bit cheating because it's cluster based system: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50004268enw https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50004268enw So 4 sockets per chassis, up to 8 chassis in a complete system. Afaik OS sees it as single huge system, that is kinda their special sauce here.
      - 7mo ago

iberator 7mo ago

Why do you needs so many cores for? Apache threads? Any old school wizard here?

andriy_koval 7mo ago
data processing
- lysace 7mo ago
  As opposed to?
  - andriy_koval 7mo ago
    OP asked why one would need so many cores, I answered: data processing. Sorry, not sure I am following your question.
whateverboat 7mo ago
Host it in proxxmox, run 8 different services on it each with 32 cores.
Tepix 7mo ago
Yeah, virtualization, many (small) containers / VMs.
toast0 7mo ago
I used to run many hosts with 28 cores per host. If performance scales, it's nicer to have a few 288 core hosts rather than a few hundred 28 core hosts. Getting the performance to scale can be hard, of course. The less inter-core communication the better. Things that tend to work well are either stuff where a bunch of data comes in and a single thread works on it for a significant amount of time then ships the result or things where you can rely on the NIC(s) to split traffic and you can process the network queue for a connecrion on the same core that handles the userspace stuff (see Receive Side Scaling), but you need a fancy NIC to have 288 network queues.
7mo ago

hedora 7mo ago

So, they're selling this as an AI accelerator, with drop in compatibility with existing boards, and no boost to RAM bandwidth. As I understand things, it would be extremely unusual to ship a chip that was bound by floating point throughput, not uncached memory access, especially in the desktop/laptop space. I haven't been following the Intel server space too carefully, so it's an honest question: Was the old thing compute and not bandwidth limited, or is this going to be running inference at the same throughput (though maybe with lower power consumption)?

Tepix 7mo ago
No, they're not selling this as an "AI accelerator": Here is the quote: "The company says operators deploying 5G Advanced and future 6G networks increasingly rely on server CPUs for virtualized RAN and edge AI inference, as they do not want to re-architect their data centers in a bid to accommodate AI accelerators." Edge AI usually means very small models that run fine on CPUs.
- hedora 7mo ago
  A very small model is going to be, what, 8GB? That'll easily blow through the caches. You're going to end up bottlenecked on DRAM either way. So, I wonder if this is going to be any faster than the previous generation for edge AI.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    Perhaps instead of posting erroneous assertions to HN you could wander over to your LLM of choice and ask it something along the lines of: What are some examples of edge AI applications that achieve good performance on a CPU where memory bandwidth is severely limited compared to a GPU? Please link to publicly available models where possible.
    - hedora 7mo ago
      I run AI applications all the time in exactly those situations. The models range from 2GB (vector models) 30GB (small LLMs) to 100GB (medium LLMs). None of those fit in 4MB of cache (the per-core on this part), or 1GB (the aggregate cache). What AI models are you actually talking about? Do you mean old-school ML stuff, like decision trees or high dimensional indexes? No one I know calls those "AI", which is generally reserved for big-ish neural networks.

bigbuppo 7mo ago

Meanwhile, somebody put 8192 arm cores on a chip and ran a risc-v emulator on top of that which emulated a 6502 which then emulated a 288 core xeon and it used 0.01% of the power and outperformed the Intel chip in every other metric 10:1, probably.

jvanderbot 7mo ago
You know, a link would be great for this comment.
- CoastalCoder 7mo ago
  Too risky.
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  https://theonion.com https://theonion.com, probably
  - bigbuppo 7mo ago
    Ah, nice to see a fellow lover of the finest news publication on the planet.
- throwaway11456 7mo ago
  Well Linux was booted on an Intel 4004, emulating a MIPS R3000. Looks like it booted in 4.76 days. I don't believe this article was AI fabricated. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-on-intels-first-ever-cpu/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-o...
  - DetroitThrow 7mo ago
    Somehow, that still doesn't sound real, but it looks like it is. Wow. Though that one was written by their recently fired hallucination writer.
ilaksh 7mo ago

Sweepi 7mo ago

if 18A is Intel's make-or-break, its a break. Their next node looks promising.

boltzmann-brain 7mo ago

Helped a friend make a difficult career decision (cozy job vs something hard and new + moving to a new city) that ultimately ended up with him working on the project. Glad that happened. I love to see people grow.

O5vYtytb 7mo ago

Sure looks like a lot of glue holding that CPU together :)

s3p 7mo ago
As soon as I read chiplets I thought about this too! Glad even intel agrees that chiplet architecture is the way forward.

avhception 7mo ago

A bad moment to have a make-or-break moment for your CPU business - a lot of customers will probably hold off purchases right now because of the RAM prices, no matter how good your CPU might be.

winwang 7mo ago
If you have enough cores, you could pool the L1 together for makeshift RAM!
skyberrys 7mo ago
Isn't this new server CPU a drop in replacement though? So the DC could pull off the old CPU, drop in the new one and not touch the existing RAM setup, yet be able to deliver better performance within the limits of the existing RAM. Then once RAM prices drop (okay that might be a while) separately upgrade the RAM at a different time.
- to11mtm 7mo ago
  That's semi-dependent on supplier arrangements; i.e. lots of shops won't want to upgrade CPUs on a server out of fear that they can't get support later; sometimes that's justified by contract, sometimes it's not.
tempaccount5050 7mo ago
In my experience, RAM costs will have very little impact on businesses buying servers. When we buy is pretty much set by contract and warranty cycles.

andreadev 7mo ago

I think everyone's focusing on the core count, but the packaging story is way more interesting here. This thing is 12 separate chiplets on 18A stacked on base dies made on Intel 3, connected to I/O tiles on Intel 7. Three different process nodes in one package, shipping at volume. That's nuts. And it's clearly an IFS play too. Intel Foundry needs a proof point — you can publish PDKs all day, but nothing sells foundry credibility like eating your own cooking in a 288-core server part at 450W. If Foveros Direct works here, it's the best ad Intel could run for potential foundry customers. The chiplet sizing is smart for another reason nobody's mentioned: yield. 18A is brand new, yields are probably rough. But 24 cores per die is small enough that even bad yields give you enough good chiplets. Basically AMD's Zen playbook but with a 3D twist. Also — 64 CXL 2.0 lanes! Several comments here are complaining about DDR5 prices, which is fair. But CXL memory pooling across a rack could change that math completely. I wonder if Intel is betting the real value isn't the cores but being the best CXL hub in the datacenter. The ARM competition is still the elephant in the room though. "Many efficient cores" is what ARM has always done natively, and 17% IPC uplift on Darkmont doesn't close that gap by itself.

Dunedan 7mo ago
> 18A is brand new, yields are probably rough. That the CPU cores are low frequency cores probably helps with yield as well.
- epolanski 7mo ago
  Are the two things related?
nsteel 7mo ago
Agree entirely with your take. The packaging story is awesome, I wish there were more details on the stacking used on this one. But I am at a loss to how Intel are really going to get any traction with IFS. How can anyone trust Intel as a long-term foundry partner. Even if they priced it more aggressively, the opportunity cost in picking a supplier who decides to quit next year would be catastrophic for many. The only way this works is if they practically give their services away to someone big, who can afford to take that risk and can also make it worth Intel's continued investment. Any ideas who that would be, I've got nothing.

bee_rider 7mo ago

I don’t quite follow: > From a cache hierarchy standpoint, the design groups cores into four-core blocks that share approximately 4 MB of L2 cache per block. As a result, the aggregate last-level cache across the full package surpasses 1 GB, roughly 1,152 MB in total. If cores are grouped into four-core blocks, and each block has 4MB of cache… isn’t that just 1MB per core? So 288MB total? HotHardware reports https://hothardware.com/news/intel-clearwater-forest-xeon-6-plus-launch https://hothardware.com/news/intel-clearwater-forest-xeon-6-... > these processors pack in up to 288 of the little guys as well as 576MB of last-level cache, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 12-channel DDR5-8000. > The Xeon 6+ processors each have up to 12 compute tiles fabbed on 18A, all of which have six quad-core modules for a total of 24 cores per tile. There are also three 'active' base tiles on Intel 3, so-called because the base tiles include 192MB of last-level cache, which is so-called because each compute tile has 48MB of L3 cache. So maybe 1MB per core L2, then 192MB of basically-L4 per base tile, then 48MB of L3 per compute tile? 192*3+48*12 gets me to the 1152, maybe that’s it. Anyway, apparently these things will have “AMX” matrix extensions. I wonder if they’ll be good number crunchers.

gregw2 7mo ago

Where's my new AWS Redshift instance with this? Been stuck on ra3 for 5 years now...

midtake 7mo ago

I honestly just want Intel to fail. I believe they have done more anticompetitive harm than good these past years. Datacenter needs to move to ARM so Intel can finally go home.

mikelitoris 7mo ago

More Intel vaporware. Seriously, their other 18A product, panther lake, supposedly "launched" January 18th. It's been 1.5 months and I still can't go and buy any panther lake laptop except from dell.com. Why are they like this? I'll believe it when I see it. Also about "make-or-break": they've been saying this for all of Intel's products since at least 2022 *yawn*

stinkbeetle 7mo ago
AFAIKS there are 18A laptops from Lenovo and HP for the first two I checked. Or do you mean if you click through and buy one it gets put on some indeterminate backorder?
- mikelitoris 7mo ago
  link?
  - stinkbeetle 7mo ago
    https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-slim-series/lenovo-yoga-slim-7i-ultra-gen-11-aura-edition-14-inch-intel/len101y0064 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-slim-series... https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-series/lenovo-ideapad-slim-5i-gen-11-16-inch-intel-laptop/83s6cto1wwus1 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-... EDIT: Changed the lenovo link to a non-preorder laptop (was https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-next-gen-ai-14-kd0047nr https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-n...)
    - lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
      “Preorder”
      - stinkbeetle 7mo ago
        Oh, there are so many lenovo ones I just picked one at random and didn't notice it said preorder. The HP link doesn't say that though, right? Here's another lenovo one that doesn't say preorder. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-series/lenovo-ideapad-slim-5i-gen-11-16-inch-intel-laptop/83s6cto1wwus1 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-slim-...

StacyRawls 6mo ago

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