Re: Poor old Intel.....
If I recall, 1 64 core Rome CPU wipes the floor with a dual socket top silicon intel offering whilst also being about half the price and taking MUCH less power
If you need large memory support, it's worse than double for Intel equivalent. The prices I've been able to find (Inte/AMD don't tend to make list prices available to the unwashed masses for their high-end server processors, so can be hard finding accurate prices) are for the AMD 7742, 64 cores, 2.25GHz-3.4(?)GHz, ~US$7k. I couldn't find a price on the 2.6GHz-3.3GHz 7H12.
The nearest equivalent Intel processor is the Platinum 8280, 28-cores, 2.7-4GHz, ~US$10k. But note that it only supports 1TB of ram per socket, whereas the AMD Epyc support 4TB per socket.
So a 2-socket (the maximum Epyc supports) 7742 would be 128 cores, up to 8TB RAM, $14k for the CPUs.
For Intel you'd need 4 8280's to get to 112 cores, them being a bit faster should make up for the core count deficit to AMD, for ~$40k. But only up to 4TB total system support (1TB per socket x 4).
To get 8TB on Intel and the 112 core count, you'd need 4 8280Ls, which are $17k a pop. So 4 of these would give the same 112 cores (at the same speed of the 8280, the only difference between the 'L' and non-L is the memory size support), and the 8TB support (actually up to 20TB using Optane Memory), for $68k in CPUs alone. Five and a half times the 128 cores of AMD Epyc CPUs. And of course, being a 4-socket board, the board itself would be significantly more expensive than the AMD 2-socket board.
Although I understand that motherboards that support 4TB per socket are very rare, hence Intel's deliberate segmentation of their processors into 1TB/socket and 4.5TB/socket lines. Most sales are for 1TB/socket, with customers wanting greater than that being fairly niche. But since AMD can far surpass Intel's core counts per socket, they'd obviously need to up their per socket memory support to allow greater overall RAM with less sockets.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
