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Comment by Tostino | Hacker News Reader

I can see a use case for it, as long as it delivers on performance. No one minds high TDP, as long as it offers a performance advantage. Hell, some servers have 4-8 Titans in them, and no one is complaining about their TDP. If a 260W CPU TDP is justified by the performance, no one will care.

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The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]

However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).

maybe for single server or academia setups, but in datacenters TDP and power consumption absolutely do matter.

And that was my point as well.

I'm more than willing to admit I could be wrong. And maybe Intel will push the TDP envelope with servers as well if Naples proves a threat when things all shake out. Just if Intel hasn't put a ~250W server chip into production I doubt AMD will then again if it performs that much better then there's a calculus there that will need to be done. My prediction, based on no evidence, is that this 32-core chip will be clocked at 2.6ghz and boost to 3.2. Shot in the dark, but given current TDPs that's where I think things might shake out to.

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