My take on Intel's Server earnings report:
Recently, Intel has said their Enterprise sales have been declining, while COMMs and Cloud has more than offset the Enterprise decline and contributed to the overall increase in earnings for their Datacenter group. They were also saying its due to Enterprise decline their growth projection has been lowered.
I think I know why.
Early leaks said Purley, was supposed to be the biggest platform advance in a decade. The features on Purley were:
-Great performance improvement, with 6 channel memory and 28 cores
-OmniPath
-AVX-512
-Optane DIMM
-On package accelerators, including FPGA
On package accelerators will be coming later, but Optane DIMMs are delayed until Cascade Lake, next year's Xeon Scalable.
But specifically dealing with the Enterprise sector, lack of Optane DIMMs mean there's no upgrade path for them. Purley combined E5 and E7 into one platform. The E5 directly connects CPU to the DRAM which means better performance, but lower capacity. The E7 uses memory buffer chips to improve(double) capacity but it results in increased power use, cost, and lower performance. The E7's increased memory capacity is what Enterprise sector likely wants.
By offering the Optane DIMM, Intel would bring E5 and E7 into a single roof. Optane DIMM allowing increased memory capacity would have been perfect for the E7 crowd, which is mostly Enterprise.
Next year if they report Enterprise sector is back in the positive I wouldn't be surprised.
