Who's going to buy and deploy those chips though? Don't AWS, Google, Azure use Intel exclusively and I assume have lock-in contracts? The exception are GPU's, which AMD (NVIDIA) has some cloud penetration[1] but still lots of work left to do.
Of course that's on consumer chips with higher clocks for gaming - the math might be different when we get it down closer to 2 GHz.
Anecdote time: my 5820K (4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltage) pulls 92W during a Handbrake encode. It pulls ~140W during a Prime95 run. I think that's roughly comparable to what 6C Ryzen is pulling at equivalent clocks - if not less.
I just built a Xeon E5-2650v3 ES (10C at 2.3 GHz all-core) system last week for video encoding ($60 mobo from MicroCenter, $150 processor off eBay, threw the rest together from parts). It pulls 60W doing the same encodes, and hits roughly the same framerates. Single-thread performance is pretty bad though.
In the Anandtech forums there are some benchmarks of underclocked, undervolted Ryzen and the performance/W is frankly astonishing. Well beyond anything Intel produces, and yes that includes 10C 2.3GHz Xeons, even modern ones.
Moreover, the consumer Zen parts have the local power plane regulators fused off. Now, I don't know if this is due to design bugs or product differentiation, but if they do have them enabled for Naples that is another big efficiency bump waiting to happen.
TLDR: you can't extrapolate the performance of server parts based on desktop parts, because of different silicon profiles and server-specific power features.
Although in a lot of ways it does appear to be more stable than Ryzen given its memory problems. Especially regarding ECC. I trust a relatively mature platform like Haswell-E much more than something like Ryzen where even basic memory functionality is touchy and ECC is entirely unvalidated. Given a budget build I know which I'd trust.
I was more aiming at TDP figures there. Although I realize anecdotes are not super reliable data, I put the Xeon box together over the weekend and I was literally just looking at the power data last night to see how it was doing.
I was worried about cooling at first, before I knew the TDP numbers it would hit. It's on a Hyper T4 and it didn't break 40C during an overnight x264 encode so I'm pretty happy with that.
1. A lot of Intel consumer platforms (which Ryzen is) had early issues with DDR4 on Z170; there's lots of forum posts about that.
2. AMD said it was not going to be validating ECC for consumer processors.
3. Haswell-E you're referencing officially only supports up to DDR4 2133Mhz memory. Depending on your configuration Ryzen officially supports more (2666, 4000)
4. You're comparing a $1200 chip to $500 chip at retail.
5. You're comparing the TDP on processor running at 1 to 1.5GHz more.
6. ES samples tend to run at lower clock speed then official final processors with hopefully lower temperature as well.
This just isn't remotely an apples to apples comparison. I'm curious what the comparison will look like once there's HPED AM4 chips.
On the flip side I personally would not trust a ES chip personally. The chips are know to contain unfixed errata addressed in further versions of the silicone and a lot of motherboard do not contain microcode updates for those.
In CPU-Z I am getting something different from the seller's published CPU-Z screenshot - it's showing stepping "R2" ("retail"?) - however the name string is also still showing as "ES".
I've attached a dump from CPU-Z that shows CPUID 0x0 and 0x1 values. From the processor value (0x000306F2) and the Intel data I could dig up - it would appear that this is actually the SR1Y1 stepping. Which is apparently the M1 stepping. Possibly actually a QS rather than ES.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
Not holding out hope overall given that it was sold as the M0 stepping but I guess you never know, maybe I got lucky. There was no pic on the eBay auction, and I would have to pull the cooler back off to check what's printed on the processor itself.
Do you have a source for this?
[1] Prime95 SmallFFT, 1800X = 220W, 6900K = 187W
(anecdotal evidence: the ~140W package TDP I observe with Prime95 on a 6-core (analogous to the 6850K) is just about right for 178W total system power at 80% efficiency, so their numbers ring true here. I just ran another Prime95 SmallFFT test and I came up with 133W package TDP on HwMonitor64.)
[1.1] Prime95 SmallFFT: 1800X @ 4 GHz = 253W, 6900K @ 4.2GHz = 255W
Basically AMD is low-balling their TDP here (they rated the TDP for like 1-2 core loads with maybe a mild load on the other cores, is the official word IIRC) and Intel is high-balling their TDP, something like mixed-allcore with a decent amount of AVX thrown in.
In practice: both 8-core processors at default clocks are around 125W at a full normal (non-AVX) workload. Both 8-core processors are around 200W with an aggressive overclock. The 6900K tends to win modestly in most cases in either scenario (CineBench is like AMD's best-case). The general take was that the 1800X was a win on price vs the 6900X, not an overall win on performance or efficiency.
To sum up, the processors are within 10% power consumption on any given workload which is pretty much neck and neck as far as I'm concerned (normal variability). It's a good result for AMD given their Bulldozer track record but it's not an obvious win in efficiency. Again, of course the picture for server chips at 2.5 GHz might look very different than the picture at 4 GHz but that's speculation.
Sources:
[0] https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
[1] https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2017/03/02/amd-ryzen-1800x...
[1.1] ibid
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...
Looking at package-TDP only gives you a totally different picture. Not invalid necessarily - but different. It's easier to tease out the system under test but it's more difficult to get a holistic picture.
(As such, it is much much easier to cook the books when all you have to do is lie through a sensor readout than when you have to lie to a meter at the power plug. This is usually a game that gets played with GPUs, i.e. how the RX 480's "GPU-only" TDP excludes power consumption from memory, losses to VRMs, etc)
Also - servers are pretty much never at 0% load. Any system that has CPUs at 0% load consistently was over-allocated in the first place. Ryzen does idle a little bit better than Broadwell-E - although factoring out the PSU inefficiencies near the zero bound it's probably more like 25W for Broadwell vs 15W for Ryzen.
Right now HwMonitor64 says my 5820K is idling at the desktop at 25W FYI - "as reported by the CPU".
The alternative measure is to put a clamp meter on the EPS12V line, but this is unlikely to be accurate either.
Intel didn't need exclusive contracts: they simply had a much better CPU, cheaper.