Intel's 28-core Xeon W-3175X listed at approx £4,000

Quote:

Originally Posted by scaryjim

Nothing is well established about the W-3175X - we've seen it operational exactly once, under unusual and contrived circumstances. You're basing your assumptions on reports of boards designed for overclocking. The 2990WX doesn't exactly sip power either. Hexus' 4GHz all core overclock pulled > 500W at the wall and spiked the temperature to over 90C.

I'm also basing my assertions on 8180 specifications of which this processor is an 8180 rebadged. There has been also excellent tear downs of both the board and processor capabilities by multiple media outlets so we have a fairly good assertion of the expected specifications.

Quote:

Originally Posted by scaryjim

You can't directly compare the Intel and AMD clock speeds because the IPC isn't the same. I was comparing the W-3175X to the 7980X, where the base clock difference is 2.6GHz to 3.1GHz. And as I said, the 7980X gets close to the 2990WX in some tests. The W-3175X has a > 50% core increase and ~ 20% base clock increase compared to the 7980X - that could potentially make it 80% faster than the 7980X. The 2990WX is not 80% faster than the 7980X across the board.

Ah, see now you're missing the point here, 32 Zen+ cores at 5GHz is equivalent to 28 Skylake++++ cores from Intel at 5GHz. IPC is NOT the same. We also must remember diminishing returns that as the frequency ramps up on more cores, you may not get the same performance per core.

Also, to correct your math in two areas:
-The 3175X does not have a greater than 50% increase in cores, it has a 36% increase in core numbers so even then it is still an increase.
-Also, the Turbo on the 7980XE actually keeps it operationally under load at 4.2GHz which means the 3175X is only 100MHz faster at peak than the 7980XE but does have a 36% core advantage and a per core single thread advantage over AMD, granted.

Additionally, as there have been no architectural improvements between any of the 4 past generations from Intel, we can do the calculation on the 7980XE which is (4198/18)*28 giving 6530 which we will add the 2% faster clockspeed at peak which gives 6660. That means, broad estimate, as you're correct no one has it in their hands yet, the 3175X could be up to 28% faster than the 2990WX due to per core IPC improvements over the other and a slight megahertz increase.

Quote:

Originally Posted by scaryjim

While I don't disagree that on balance the 2990WX is better overall, there will almost certainly be workloads for which the W-3175X is faster. If you're doing one of those workloads the business case is there to be made. It's not just about mindshare - it's about horses for courses.

Horses for course only works if you're not breaking your bank to race that horse.