Intel's chicken is plucked their net income is down
114% their margins have shrunk by half and their manufacturing capabilities are
so out of date that they're paying their competitor tsmc to produce chips for
them and adding insult to injury their
new Sapphire Rapids lineup of server CPUs has finally limped to the Finish
Line two months after AMD's incredibly
powerful not to mention cheaper epic Genoa counter punch with poor pricing
and customer hostile Hardware as a service features it's starting to feel
like we're watching a Goliath Mega Corporation crumbling in slow motion
under the weight of its own hubris so why then is pulseway
sponsoring us to tell you about a crappy product that you probably shouldn't buy
it's because they know that with a new server and workstation processor come
many of the same old problems and the rmm tools in both pulseway mobile and
web apps are more than serviceable Solutions and despite the fact that
these chips are as outdated as they are brand new Intel has their sight set
clearly on the future an accelerated future and as bad as things look at the
moment that future might be pretty bright good gravy this thing is thick
like it's not bigger than last gen but look at the size of it like you could
hurt a man with it maybe even kill him if you get the angle just right you know
Sapphire fire Rapids the code name for Intel's fourth generation of Zeon
scalable CPUs is based on the same golden Cove core architecture that can
be found in the performance cores of their 12th gen desktop processors Yes
you heard me last year's consumer chips
that's a yikes but it does still mean a
15% IPC uplift over their previous generation Zeon so that's good and
there's a lot more that's different AMD was the first to bring chiplet CPUs to
the world processors that use multiple dieses with a high-speed interconnector
glue as Intel derisively put it at the time how the turntables have turn taed
this generation xeons then will glue together up to four chiplets to reach
core counts as high as 60 but the devil's in the details and Intel's glue
differs from amds in some key ways while
AMD sticks their compute and their caches together and then lose these core
complexes to a separate chiplet that contains the memory controller and the
io Intel has opted to keep all memory
and IO functions on die with the logic and cache then they take these near
complete CPUs and wire them to each other using a fabric interconnect which
means that in some ways it really is more like just gluing multiple CPUs
together which is hilarious but hey at least they can glue them together in a
lot of different ways Intel has announced and supposedly released 52 SKS
of fourth generation Zeon scalable with more apparently coming so it seems like
part of their strategy then was to find every possible segment of the market and
build a just right option for it inside
it are two well one for now but we'll put the second one in in a minute two
Intel Zeon Platinum 8468 processors each
with 48 cores 96 threads and a max turbo
speed of 3.8 GHz these chips are equipped with 105 megab
of cache have a 350 wat TDP and come in
at an eye watering list price of
in the socket and putting the heat sink on that you actually install the CPU to
the heat sink and put the whole thing on the socket wild right okay so um
paste you need so much of it we should call
this oh a bit got in the socket that's
probably fine you need so much of this they should call this CPU the paste
eater also because it's been so successful so far okay sorry uh anyo um
this thing is this is keyed so it only goes in one way oh my God this is
ridiculous seriously this is what holds
this in this ARM yeah thanks I hate it
no no no no no no no no no this is what helps you get it out so you put it oh
this levers it out okay so you just
stick this boy in here oh my god
seriously Intel you have how many billions of dollars to spend on
engineering and this is the solution this is exactly the kind of precision
engineered Jank that I would expect from Intel and then when it's time to get it
out you use this little lever to pop it up okay we're not going to do that right
now ridiculous okay we got a little bit of
thermal compound in the socket but um it looks like it mostly fell between the
pins so hopefully this is going to work for RAM we have 512 gigs of 4800 megat
transfer per second ddr5 which sounds like a lot but that is a fraction of the
maximum that this server can handle thanks to Intel's support for up to
eight channels of ddr5 per CPU and
unlike AMD's competitor up to two dims
per channel that puts the total memory support for this system with two CPUs in
it at 12 terabytes the fck each CPU also
brings 80 Lanes of PCIe Gen 5 expansion
to the table up to five integrated Hardware accelerators assuming you pay
Intel to unlock them we'll definitely get to that later and on their soon to
be released zeeon Max series of CPUs they're gluing up to 64 GB of high
bandwidth memory 2E directly on the package this could end up giving AMD's
3D vcash technology a run for its
money coming back to glue for a moment This Server may only have two sockets in
it but the highest tier of sapphire Rapids chips can glue as many as eight
of these chips together in a single server meaning that you could have up to
960 threads of computation on a single board absolutely dwarfing AMD epic which
is expected to cap out at just two sockets and 512 threads per system even
on their upcoming Bergamo CPUs that's a lot of cores to do out to your virtual
machines thankfully you can easily manage and monitor all that stuff
offsite with pulseway mobile app it helps you track performance and you can
get notified of a VM is acting out of turn and snipe it from the comfort of
wherever your phone is not only does pulseway give you complete control over
your servers and network computers from any mobile phone or tablet but their web
app is also great for it management if you need to run updates or have concerns
about CPU temperatures pulseway has intuitive automation tools for Windows
Mac and Linux this means that you can approach monitoring across your entire
environment without the need to micromanage every operation now let's
get this thing up and running shall we maybe give cine bench a go to get an idea of all core
performance I hope it actually turns on
we did not anticipate this uh dang it Adam give her one of these
yeah it's not there yeah okay well hold on let's put the shrouds in before they
start trying to blow away the computer
you have to have the touch uh it's not turning on we got blinking lights yeah
we're g we're blinking up here it's still not turning on holy
that's it that's the noise we
want well let's see if it actually boots
we did get it to turn on but there's a memory training error which means it's
not seated properly so all we can really do until we find out where our torque
wrenches because engineering has it is kind of try to get these the
same very clever packaging this is apparently our torque screwdriver do you
happen to have a T30 bit okay how do I I
don't know oh you've never used it
no damn it ttin well sure yeah I mean
you've probably used more Torque screwdrivers than I have manual why
would I use a manual I've got people for
that okay inch oh my god wow that's fun
okay so how many newton meters it's uh
0.904 this is scary this seems like too much okay then go to last the good news
is if we Breck this thing we've already benchmarked everything so we'll just
continue the video and pretend this didn't happen well one thing we know for
sure is that it's a bit of a finicky socket to install in that's good for the
dozens of you who will deal with this to know the good news as I mentioned before
is that we already tested all this stuff ahead of time so wow what a fast
cinebench render that we would have been looking at on this monitor but wait a
challenger from team red approaches that's right we got another server and
this one is equipped with a single Flagship AMD epic
9654 but that's not fair lonus you might
say you can't put two CPUs up against
one I can and I will two Intel 8468
costs $14,400 one Epic 9654 costs around
$112,000 same number of cores better
price and on paper they even hit similar
all core frequencies shall we drag Ras them well spoiler we
did it already so yes AMD is faster how
about a blender render haha yes we did
this already and AMD is faster again but
as interesting as those tests are we should really be looking at workloads
that are closer to what these server chips were actually built for like
managing databases or virtualization unfortunately for Intel
the story doesn't really get any Ros you're here postgres sees Intel get
absolutely trounced by AMD I mean losing by that much in one of the most popular
types of databases that's a really bad sign and what about grx a molecular
Dynamic simulator well here Intel
actually manages to pull out a win so their high performance compute dreams
might not be totally crushed until you
consider their margin of Victory here compared to their margin of defeat in
pretty much any other General compute task epic is just looking like the
obvious choice here unless you know for a fact that you're going to run one
application and one only that happens to benefit from Intel's chip design and for
all the Ruckus that Intel has made about efficiency improvements they lose in
every single one of our tests and we understand that a dual socket system
will use more power than a single socket system so this isn't a onetoone
comparison but here's the thing if AMD only needs a single socket for 96 cores
well what am I supposed to do hamstring it by saying no you must have more
sockets of course not and neither would any decent procurement officer who's
evaluating this hardware for their needs if you want a many core server Intel
Sapphire Rapids costs more to buy and
costs more to run and they have no one to blame but themselves
today but as we said Intel is laser
focused on the future and that future is AI so they put extra effort into
implementing accelerators for AI inferencing and other common workloads
directly onto the CPU now if you're a consumer the concept of a hardware
accelerator might already be familiar unlike the general purpose cores on your
chip accelerators are hyper efficient for specific workloads but then
essentially useless for anything else Hardware video decoders for example are
what makes it possible to watch YouTube for hours on end without your phone
turning into a hot potato but that is all they do and they take up valuable
die space Intel clearly thought that was worthwhile and the first big one they
built in is AMX which stands for advanced Matrix
extensions sorry sorry you can think of this one as kind
of an evolution of AVX or Advanced Vector extensions it is ideally going to
provide a massive increase in the CPU's ability to perform AI inference with
Intel sighting up to a 10 times improvement over ABX 512 I mean to be
clear this is not going to replace dedicated accelerators like NVIDIA's T4
cards but it's a lot better than nothing
so do they win out in a light AI workload then that's a yes with a
capital h y AMX can perform AI tasks with
double or triple the performance of AVX 512 that's fast almost as fast as you'll
be in our new LTT tracksuit in general the lead over AMD
is Stark even if this doesn't translate to gains in every AI workload and it
could prove to be more and more useful into the future as we see small AI tasks
sneak their way into software that might run on a system like this as opposed to
a dedicated machine learning box that's stuffed full of
gpus what do the rest of these accelerators do well first their data
streaming accelerator should improve performance in tasks where data is
constantly generated by hundreds if not thousands of sources like logging the
Telemetry data of many different sensors that you might be monitoring after a
scheduled remote patch that you initiated with pulseway the inmemory
analytics accelerator moves important analytical calculations of databases
away from the CPU course then Intel's Dynamic load balance are supposed to
help manage and distribute work across the many cores in your CPU finally quick
Assist Technology accelerates encryption and compression the idea here is pretty
sound and you can think of it kind of like how pulseway works I know I keep
bringing pulseway into it they sponsor the video what do you want so with
pulseway you could do everything
manually right but it's slower and it's less efficient so you can think of
pulseway as kind of like a hardware accelerator for your workpace you spend
some of your time using their intuitive automation workflow then your repetitive
tasks run on autopilot allowing you to focus your brain power on important
things which improves productivity or saves power uh whichever it appeals to
you more the thing is though while we would love to put all of these
accelerators little timesavers efficiency makers to the test it's still
early days and software support simply isn't there yet and it might never get
there it all depends on whether organizations end up making use of these
accelerators there is one feature though that Intel has ready at launch and it's
got their shareholders a buzz even if nobody else is impressed it's called
Intel on demand and frankly calling it a feature seems kind of generous what it
does is it allows customers to upgrade their CPUs by paying Intel to unlock the
hardware accelerators that are already in the Silicon on the chip but are
blocked through software the most charitable possible
take here is that this will allow Enterprise customers to Save A Buck at
the time of purchase and then upgrade their chips down the line to accelerate
new workloads no need to remove replace place and reconfigure a brand new server
which can be a hassle especially with how finicky these CPUs are you just
unlock the features you need and you're on your way massively reducing the time
to value for customers well that's great right savings on initial purchases is a
good thing well kind of except that at
risk of painting their entire 52 skew lineup with a broad brush Sapphire
Rapids is a pretty bad deal up front and
that's even before you pay Intel's ransom for unlocking the hardware they
already sold you you I mean I'm not sure how it happened but Intel managed to
price their topend chip 50% higher than
amds which as we've already discussed kind of dunks on it so then how is it
that Intel still has so much of the Enterprise market and why aren't more
customers crossing the line over to AMD
well it's a combination of factors first up is long-term deals many of these
Sapphire rapid CPUs were purchased long ago and customers just been waiting
through the delays for them to finally be delivered Intel also has both the
manufacturing capacity and the engineering staff to support the kinds
of customers who buy chips in the hundreds or the thousands or even the
tens of thousands rather than one by one like you or I might do over the next
couple of years though it's clear that AMD is going to continue to consume
Intel's valuable data center market share especially in servers that rely on
general purpose High Core count SE CPUs
for specific workloads that can take advantage of Intel's accelerators though
AMD has a lot of work to do and it's going to take some time but that's okay
they've clearly got it and as bad as Intel's quarterly results and forecast
look so do they I mean turning a ship as
big as Intel takes years and they have plenty of cash on hand to navigate this
rough patch I mean look at AMD many were skeptical that they would ever be able
to turn it around after their embarrassing bulldozer line of CPUs but
a CEO Swap and 5 or 6 years later the company was fully revitalized as they
began launching product after product that made Intel shake in their boots
like like what's happening now thanks again to pulseway when it comes to
monitoring and management these folks are great so if you're an MSP or you
just want to be able to keep tabs on your system while you're out at dinner pulseway has your back they're hooking
up LTT viewers with a no risk-free trial so check them out at the link in the
video description thanks to AMD for getting Intel to actually start
competing again and thanks to pulse for sponsoring this video right now they're
hooking up our viewers with a free trial so if you want to use pulseway to manage
your devices like we do check them out in the video description