When companies like Cloudflare are openly announcing that none of their upcoming servers will use Intel, you have to admit something's wrong.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/cloudflare_picks_amd_...
> "We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server – that's enormous."
Lake has turned out to be Intel's decline into Bulldozer chip style design issues. They might perform fine but they're too hot, too outdated and too expensive.
AMX might be interesting, too, although I currently stick to `Float32`+ precision, so I don't have use at the moment for <=16-bit FLOPS.
Overall, saphire rapids looks very interesting to me. Of course, being built on an upgrade of the same node as Ice Lake means heat/energy use aren't getting better, so perf/watt gains will probably mostly have to happen on the perf side of things.
Tiger Lake clocks much higher than Ice Lake, but I'm not sure how their energy use compares at the same clock speeds. Saphire Rapids is another node upgrade on top of Tiger Lake.
Because of that, it is much less efficient than Tiger Lake, which is made on the 3rd variant of 10-nm Intel process. Tiger Lake is still less efficient than the CPUs made with the TSMC 7-nm process, like Zen 3.
Sapphire Rapids will be made with the 4th variant of the 10-nm Intel process, the same as Alder Lake, now renamed as "Intel 7".
So Sapphire Rapids is 2 generations above the current Ice Lake Server and it should be much more efficient. We still have to see how Alder Lake will behave, but there is a chance that "Intel 7" might be more efficient than the now old 7-nm TSMC process.
However, when Sapphire Rapids will become available next year, AMD will probably soon launch Zen 4, using the 5-nm TSMC process, so it might become again better than Intel.
I agree. Although I think CloudFlare's is a bit more unique than most data centre usage. CloudFlare say it's all about efficiency here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...
Also note that Intel's revenue is only about 1/3 data centre (DCG in https://www.intc.com/segments - I didn't find 2021 numbers).
Island is quite attractive and have a few data centers (Google for sure and IIRC some crypto companies).
But power is important for sure.
If you buy top line Intel processors they are. But reliability, higher speed and lower power consumption used to make up for it.
It’s also important to distinguish CAPEX vs OPEX.
Ryzen 3 is a low-end product line (currently 4-core APUs).
Including Intel, apparently. I still think they were heading in roughly the right direction a decade ago with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture), but then they they seemed to just... kind of give up on it.
These days if I hear rumors that Intel might be about to do something bold, I don't hold my breath. I'm not saying they definitely won't find a way to recover from this current stagnation, but I've been disappointed enough times now that I'll believe it only if and when I see it on shelves and in real world benchmarks.