Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Qualcomm published benchmarks of its server SoC Centriq 2400. The Spec benchmarks look good compared to Intel Xeon, at least considering price and power. Power seems to be about 40% less than Xeon with comparable performance (according to Qualcomm, that is). Performance per core is quite lower than the Xeons though, so it needs more cores for a similar result. It is manufactured on Samsung 10nm process which seems quite capable, also for high performance applications. The Centriq 2460, the highest end model, integrates 60 MByte cache, which seems quite a lot. Will be interesting to see how it compares in terms of die size to Intel 14nm and Globalfoundry 14nm with AMDs EPYC.

Price seems significantly lower (almost half for the high end one) but this is only when compared to single socket systems from Intel. Taking a dual socket Intel based system with cheaper processors, but ending up in the same performance ballpark, the resulting price, at least for the chips, is pretty similar.

The biggest question will be total cost of ownership, where platform cost and power consumption will be crucial, as well as software issues, since that is an ARM based design. My gut feeling is that it's not quite there yet, especially since Intel just got some real competition from AMD and will likely be forced to lower prices, making the Qualcomm solution even less attractive. It will also be interesting how a similar solution from AMD compares power-wise, when real platforms are available from all three architectures.