Intel's server chip biz holds steady ahead of Ivy Bridge Xeons

You might think that Intel would have been talking a bit more excitedly about the Xeon server chip lineup when it walked through its numbers for the second quarter yesterday. Particularly with the PC business on the skids. The workhorse "Ivy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 v2 processors are slated for launch in the third quarter and the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they give an absolute breakdown?

> sales of products aimed at hyperscale data centers were up by 40%

Do they actually say what the starting numbers are, or are these just shiny "percentage increase on an unknown baseline" stats with no substance?

In my mind the number of hyperscale server farm providers I can count on one hand, so I would guess the underlying volume is tiny in the grand scheme of their business (a guess - am interested in the real data) and this was just a "big percentage" in their PR designed to look good in press pieces. It did, but I'm more interested in what the number under the 40% actually is ...

[GazH]

Re: Do they give an absolute breakdown?

I think you are greatly underestimating the amount of kit the big DC guys are buying. According to Brad Anderson during the MMS 2013 keynote, Microsoft where the largest single consumer of physical servers in the world during 2012

Now add up all the hard to count kit from Amazon, Google, Rackspace etc and I can imagine that they add up to a sizeable slice of the market for server cpu's

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Do they give an absolute breakdown?

One thing to think about,

I assume the big DC guys buy strictly on price performance. These tend to be the less profitable sort points. Perhaps this is why the drop in income is larger than revenue?

[BornToWin]

IB and Haswell a big disappointment

By almost any metric IB and Haswell are a big disappointment and offer little reason for anyone to upgrade.

[psyq]

Re: IB and Haswell a big disappointment

This news article is focused on Xeon, not the consumer line.

Ivy Bridge EP brings 50% more cores (12 vs. 8) within the same TDP bracket. This >is< significant, for the target market of the Xeon chips.

Ivy Bridge EX scales in the same way - 120 cores in 8P configuration vs. 80 cores available today.

This is nothing short of impressive, considering the fact that Ivy Bridge is just a "tick".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IB and Haswell a big disappointment

The EX is a tick/tock combo, as we did not see an EX Sandybridge. I suspect the EP to EP top sort performance delta will be quite a bit smaller. ~30% is my guess.