Some day someone will write a really good book about the rise and fall of Intel, and the effect of Intel on creating the predatory culture of Silicon Valley.
Intel has clung stubbornly to the ancient, creaky x86 architecture, and screwed up (or sabotaged) its several possible successors. I think Intel was crazy to not have bought ARM when they could.
Their new 3D flash might help, but that will be a price-war commodity, nothing like the good old days when a high-end x86 cost kilobucks.
We're probably switching back to Xilinx, now that Intel owns Altera.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
They copied AMD's X86_64 architecture when Itanic finally sank.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
That's nothing for a trading company where being a millisecond faster than your competitor means money. The stuff on that site is also just what's pubicly announced and avaiable. There are faster processors not even listed there for the really demanding customers with large budgets.
They had a line of ARMs, but got rid of it when "they decided the low-margin, high volume market was for the birds." Easier to try to hustle the Wintel desktop/laptop market out of its profits over backwards-compatibility issues.
Oops indeed. They decided too late that the cell phone market was interesting, and nobody wanted X86 for that.
Intel's process technology and ARM's architecture would have been a good combination. But it would be billions of cheap chips.
PCs are declining so Intel is hoping to charge big bucks for server chips. But the cost of computing continues to decline (by billions:1 in my career) so there is a fundamental problem. And most people don't need much computing, which is why people buy phones and not PCs.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
"Intel will start building ARM-based smartphone chips"
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That's the list price from Intel. Street prices and used prices are much lower. For example, I have a pair of matched E5450 chips that were common in servers about 10 years ago, which list for $969/ea: but are selling on eBay for about $25/ea.
The $7,174 E8890 v4 CPU listed is not on eBay (yet), but you can get a wide variety of lesser Xeon E7 server chips for under $100.
For example, the Xeon E7-8870, which lists for $4,672, sells for $90/ea on eBay:
Of course, I would not use eBay parts for production, but I'm fairly sure there's a supplier somewhere between the two extremes.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I only know what I've read in related articles. However, it looks like foundry work for Intel designs, but which include IP from ARM and others. Intel has the capacity, so making their competitors chips for them is probably not beneath their dignity. At least that's how I read this: "Our fully-qualified design platform includes design kits and flows and IP verified on silicon and augmented by a diverse third-party ecosystem."
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
It was your example of costing kilobucks. Oddly, there are online vendors selling the E7-8870 for more than the Intel engineering sample price:
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Sure, for new state-of-the-art processors. My example was a newly released CPU. What relevance is a EOL 5 year old XEON that's an engineering sample? That list price you mention was for when the CPU was *introduced*, not todays MSRP.
OK, back to $7,174 which I presume is the you're referring to as a newly released CPU. Looks like June 13, 2016 for a launch date or 3 months ago:
Notice that the price is RCP (Recommended Customer Price) 1K quantity and not the unit quantity for a sample. Details: "Recommended Customer Price (RCP) is pricing guidance only for Intel products. Prices are for direct Intel customers, typically represent 1,000-unit purchase quantities, and are subject to change without notice. Prices may vary for other package types and shipment quantities. If sold in bulk, price represents individual unit. Listing of RCP does not constitute a formal pricing offer from Intel." Although fairly new, two online vendors seem to have a few in stock at $6,000. There's also a used one on eBay for $3,000.
It's also the 1K price at the time of product launch (2nd Quarter
2011). I included the E7-8870 because it was old enough that there was a substantial number for sale online, which would establish a minimum street price.
Agreed. All that I've established is that there's a big price drop once a CPU gets into production, which isn't available to newly released chips. On intro, the chip was worth $7,174. 3 months later, it's worth $6,000. No clue what it might be a few months further downstream. After a few years, figure on maybe $100 on eBay. Such is the product life cycle of a CPU.
Drivel: Typical logarithmic time/price curve. For example: See pricing history graph.
People will pay what the market will bear. If one needs the fastest possible server CPU for a benchmark test, customer evaluation, trade show, or just bragging rights on the data sheet, then they'll pay the list price. I prefer "There's a customer born every minute".
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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