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

[HEXUS]

This 56-thread processor was touted as a December release but is yet to go official.

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[darcotech]

Oh, so that is famous Intel 28 core CPU that can hit 5Ghz overclock with only "basic cooling".

Nice. And its cheap too. I mean AMD Threadripper costs half the price with more cores. Total rip-off. /s/

[Tunnah]

Oh, so that is famous Intel 28 core CPU that can hit 5Ghz overclock with only "basic cooling".

Nice. And its cheap too. I mean AMD Threadripper costs half the price with more cores. Total rip-off. /s/

People will still buy it though. At a certain point price becomes less relevant, if the price saving will cost you in time. If this is faster than the 32 core part (minus strapping a god damn fridge to it of course) then people will pay the extra for the horsepower, and intel is very aware of this.

[Tabbykatze]

No mention of the ridiculius power phases it has to use and dual psu to support the clocks. It's a ridiculous product!

Supporting motherboards have four eight-pin EPS power connectors. The processor needs north of a 1000W to provide adequate power for overclocking. There are actually motherboards coming to market that support overclocking the W-3175X. ASUS has its ROG Dominus Extreme and Gigabyte its own competing motherboard in the pipeline, but release dates haven't been announced.

Then you'll also need a minimum of an industrial-class chiller to push the chip to the limits, much like the one Intel used for its test system at Computex. We have a detailed look at Intel's demo system here.

https://amp.tomshardware.co.uk/intel...ews-59606.html

[MrJim]

No mention of the ridiculius power phases it has to use and dual psu to support the clocks. It's a ridiculous product!

Yep...probably looking at about 15K for a system based on this processor!

[Tabbykatze]

Yep...probably looking at about 15K for a system based on this processor!

Yep, just updated my post including toms hardware link

[DanceswithUnix]

Shan't be seeing that on a Raspberry Pi then.

[scaryjim]

No mention of the ridiculius power phases it has to use and dual psu to support the clocks. It's a ridiculous product! ...

It's a ridiculous product to overclock. But then, most products that are "designed for overclocking" are ridiculous nowadays; it's no longer the case that you can buy an entry level processor and - with a bit of silicon lottery luck - overclock it to the level of a halo product.

It's a Xeon, so it's ostensibly a workstation processor, regardless of whether Intel will let you overclock it or not. In a professional environment it's most likely to be used at stock settings, and over a 3 - 5 year operational lifetime, a £2000 up-front cost difference isn't particularly significant. And at stock it's a 265W TDP processor, against the 2990WX's 250W - so again not particularly significant.

And now where it really matters - while in some workloads the 2990WX knocks the 18-core 7980XE into a cocked hat, in others it's comparatively close for having suck a significant core deficit to make up. So it's quite possible that for some workloads a stock W-3175X (which will have not only > 50% more cores than a 7980XE, but also a higher base clock) will be significantly faster than a stock 2990WX. And if it is, Intel will be laughing all the way to the very full bank...

[Lanky123]

And now where it really matters - while in some workloads the 2990WX knocks the 18-core 7980XE into a cocked hat, in others it's comparatively close for having suck a significant core deficit to make up. So it's quite possible that for some workloads a stock W-3175X (which will have not only > 50% more cores than a 7980XE, but also a higher base clock) will be significantly faster than a stock 2990WX. And if it is, Intel will be laughing all the way to the very full bank...

But surely Intel is just as likely to lose sales from its even more lucrative Xeon Platinum line at ~ $10k as it is to gain them from potential Threadripper customers. If certain workloads favour the Intel 28 core architecture and price isn't much of an issue they'd have already gone for a Xeon Platinum 8180 or similar...

[ohmaheid]

Any IT dept buying these will find their jobs in jeopardy. Not just the initial cost of hardware - but the power drain, and cooling requirements, when there are more sensible and cost effective options available.
Organisations don't buy equipment for a few points in cinebench.

[Tunnah]

But surely Intel is just as likely to lose sales from its even more lucrative Xeon Platinum line at ~ $10k as it is to gain them from potential Threadripper customers. If certain workloads favour the Intel 28 core architecture and price isn't much of an issue they'd have already gone for a Xeon Platinum 8180 or similar...

These will cannibalize the single socket ones, but for dual and above the others will still sell.

[Spud1]

You do all realise that this is not in any way aimed at home users - it's a product you will find in high end servers where there is a specific need, and at that level it's actually not too bad pricing wise when you are building servers at £8-10k a pop anyway. Intel own the x86/x64 server market anyway (AMD has approx 1-2% of that market..they don't really get a look in).

It's also not £4k to businesses - just had a quick check with our supplier and I am quoted £3,276.99 *before* our discount is applied (ex vat, as we'd reclaim that).

[Tabbykatze]

You do all realise that this is not in any way aimed at home users - it's a product you will find in high end servers where there is a specific need, and at that level it's actually not too bad pricing wise when you are building servers at £8-10k a pop anyway. Intel own the x86/x64 server market anyway (AMD has approx 1-2% of that market..they don't really get a look in).

It's also not £4k to businesses - just had a quick check with our supplier and I am quoted £3,276.99 *before* our discount is applied (ex vat, as we'd reclaim that).

A lot of business i engage with are in penny pinching territory where they can which can lead to Threadripper being a potential viable option. It would be interesting to find stats specifically focused on intel vs amd in the hedt space but i can't seem to find one that also includes standard desktop.

[badass]

People will still buy it though. At a certain point price becomes less relevant, if the price saving will cost you in time. If this is faster than the 32 core part (minus strapping a god damn fridge to it of course) then people will pay the extra for the horsepower, and intel is very aware of this.

Exactly. It's a niche product. If you're in that (very small) niche then it's good for you. If not then of course it doesn't make sense!

[darcotech]

Usually, this kind of CPUs are coming in pre-built systems. The ones who are buying this kind of heavy workstations, have habit of high prices. It would be interesting to see if there are such systems already on the market and how they compare to the ones with Threadripper 2990WX in them.

On the other hand if you are building this for you or your company, the more systems you need to build, the more it leans toward AMD, as you can probably have two AMD workstations for one Intel.

So, if you need to need this for 20 engineers or scientists or ...., your budget will be probably better spent on AMD. Making available 20 high-end workstations instead of 10 is simple mathematics.

[Tabbykatze]

It's a ridiculous product to overclock. But then, most products that are "designed for overclocking" are ridiculous nowadays; it's no longer the case that you can buy an entry level processor and - with a bit of silicon lottery luck - overclock it to the level of a halo product.

I said to support the clocks not overclocks, it has been well established that this processor is not going to sip power...

It's a Xeon, so it's ostensibly a workstation processor, regardless of whether Intel will let you overclock it or not. In a professional environment it's most likely to be used at stock settings, and over a 3 - 5 year operational lifetime, a £2000 up-front cost difference isn't particularly significant. And at stock it's a 265W TDP processor, against the 2990WX's 250W - so again not particularly significant.

You say 15W greater TDP while having 6 less cores is not particularly significant, I call it an architectural improvement by AMD. Businesses separate purchases into Capital Expenditures and Operational Expenditures where Capital is up front and Operation is credit and paid off over time. Unless they get these on an OpEx, they're going to say to the bean counters, "hey, I want budget for x number of workstations at £8k a pop please", they're either going to sign off no questions which, frankly, is unlikely or they're going to ask questions why such a high per unit cost is needed. Then we have the cooling and power requirements, at nearly upwards of 1000w for the CPU alone (over 1000W if for some reason they do overclock) not including Quaddro/Firepro, memory, storage and display power consumption which I would start being concerned about the ring mains if there are multiple.

And now where it really matters - while in some workloads the 2990WX knocks the 18-core 7980XE into a cocked hat, in others it's comparatively close for having suck a significant core deficit to make up. So it's quite possible that for some workloads a stock W-3175X (which will have not only > 50% more cores than a 7980XE, but also a higher base clock) will be significantly faster than a stock 2990WX. And if it is, Intel will be laughing all the way to the very full bank...

2990WX is base/boost 3GHZ/4.2GHz whereas the the 3175X is 3.1GHz/4.3GHz, an increase of 100MHz will make a marginal increase in performance. Considering at 5GHz the BS (not sure why Hexus is calling it "some controversy", it was outright cowpat) was getting 7334cb and the 2990WX got 7618cb, pretty close. If we remove the 100MHz increase on the 2990WX with (7618/5100)*5000 we get 7468cb which means that the extra 6 cores at the same clock should stand toe to toe with the 3175X.

Now the places the Intel side will smash it are their use of ASICs like AVX etc. This is not a fair test because everything is better with an ASIC, it's a shame Intel had to do that to continue being on top. However, doing a sheer AMD grunt versus Intel ASIC does provide a nice view but it should not be representative of the total products capability. I wish testing was done with Intel ASICs on and off.

The 2990WX is a better bet for both expense and capabilities, but it is the obstinant mindshare that is the problem.

To put it in perspective, here is a £3.3k 2990WX workstation which i just threw together: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/njM2NQ

32GB RAM, storage could be better at 500GB/6TB but there's price headroom and it has 10gigabit networking. Cheaped on a Vega 64 because I couldn't get a pricing off of pcpartpicker for the workstation cards. And it is still under the MSRP of that processor!

As Spud1 says, B2B transactions would be different from Commercial, so the build above will be even cheaper (£2793 excluding VAT). Any bean counter who finds out that the workstation is costing 3-4 times as much for a marginal increase in performance even over a multi year cycle is not a proper bean counter. This entire workstation is cheaper (ish) including VAT against the price to Spud!!!