Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Was this report about AMD EPYC vs Intel Xeon posted here before? It seems performance between the two is basically a wash but EPYC sells at less than half the price.

I found that part particularly interesting:

FPU performance is, surprisingly, AMD’s best total showing. It’s a mediocre database server, beats Intel in Java performance (but not by the same margins as in FPU code), and is extremely competitive in Big Data tests given price and clock differentials. Power consumption varies substantially by workload; the Xeon 8176 has extremely high idle power consumption, but vastly better MySQL perf/watt than Broadwell and modestly better perf/watt in this test than the Epyc 7601. In POV-RAY testing, AMD flips the tables on Intel, with higher performance at a huge power differential (327W for Epyc versus 453W for Skylake-SP).

Idle power from EPYC seems to be really good, which is very important for datacenters. It certainly depends a lot on the surrounding hardware, mainboard etc. but AMD seems to be at the same level as Intel in terms of performance/watt which is crucial for datacenters. If EPYC proves to be reliable, the cheaper price will make many switch to AMD based systems, if not just to put more pressure on Intel pricing. The more than 4000$ price tag for the EPYC leaves more than enough margin for AMD. Intel will have to compete in price as it seems, which is particularly bad for its cash cow server CPUs. Don't expect great results from Intel in the coming quarters.