- Intel's chicken is plucked. (chicken clucks)
Their net income is down 114%,
their margins have shrunk by half,
and their manufacturing capabilities are so out of date
that they're paying their competitor, TSMC,
to produce chips for them.
And, adding insult to injury,
their new Sapphire Rapids lineup of server CPUs
has finally limped to the finish line,
two months after AMD's incredibly powerful,
not to mention cheaper, EPYC Genoa counterpunch.
With poor pricing
and customer hostile Hardware-as-a-Service features,
it's starting to feel
like we're watching a goliath megacorporation
crumbling in slow motion under the weight of its own hubris.
So why then, is Pulseway sponsoring us,
to tell you about a crappy product
that you probably shouldn't buy?
It's because they know
that with a new server and workstation processor
come many of the same old problems.
And the RMM tools in both Pulseway's mobile and web apps
are more than serviceable solutions.
And, despite the fact that these chips
are as outdated as they are brand new,
Intel has their sights set clearly on the future.
An accelerated future.
And as bad as things look at the moment,
that future might be pretty bright.
Good gravy, this thing is thick.
Like, it's not bigger than last gen
but look at the size of it!
Like, you can hurt a man with it.
Maybe even kill 'em
if you get the angle just right, you know?
Sapphire Rapids, the code name
for Intel's 4th generation of Xeon Scalable CPUs,
is based on the same Golden Cove core architecture
that can be found in the performance cores
of their 12th gen desktop processors.
Yes, you heard me.
Last year's consumer chips.
That's a yikes.
But it does still mean a 15% IPC uplift
over their previous generation Xeon.
So that's good, and there's a lot more that's different.
AMD was the first to bring chiplet CPUs to the world,
processors that use multiple dies
with a high speed interconnect,
or glue, as Intel derisively put it at the time.
Ha ha. How the turntables have turn tabled.
This generation's Xeons then
will glue together up to four chiplets
to reach core counts as high as 60.
But the devil's in the details.
And Intel's glue differs from AMDs in some key ways.
While AMD sticks their compute and their caches together,
and then glues these core complexes to a separate chiplet
that contains the memory controller and the I/O,
Intel has opted to keep all memory and I/O functions
on die with the logic and cache.
Then they take these near complete CPUs
and wire them to each other using a fabric interconnect.
Which means that in some ways,
it really is more like just gluing multiple CPUs together,
(chuckles) which is hilarious.
But hey, at least they can glue them together
in a lot of different ways.
Intel has announced, and supposedly released,
52 SKUs of 4th generation Xeon Scalable
with more apparently coming.
So it seems like part of their strategy then
was to find every possible segment of the market
and build a just right option for it.
Inside it are two, well one for now,
but we'll put the second one in in a minute,
two Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 processors,
each with 48 cores, 96 threads,
and a max turbo speed of 3.8 gigahertz.
These chips are equipped with 105 megabytes of cache,
have a 350 watt TDP,
and come in at an eye-watering list price of $7,214 each.
I promise we're gonna talk more about all of that,
especially pricing, later.
First, let's get this CPU installed.
This is a bit of a new mechanism,
one that I have not seen before.
I'm gonna need some thermal compound first and foremost
because instead of installing the CPU in the socket
and putting the heatsink on that,
you actually install the CPU to the heatsink
and put the whole thing on the socket.
Wild, right?
Okay, so paste.
(chuckles)
You need so much of it, we should call this...
Oh, a bit got in the socket.
That's probably fine.
You need so much of this,
they should call this CPU the paste eater.
(laughing) Also because it's been so successful so far.
Okay, sorry.
Anyhoo, this thing is...
This is keyed so it only goes in one way.
Oh my god, this is ridiculous.
Seriously, this is what holds this in? This arm?
- [Adam] Yeah. - Thanks, I hate it.
- [Adam] No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This is what helps you get it out.
So- - Oh.
- [Camera Person] You put it- - Oh, this levers it out.
- [Camera Person] Yeah. - Okay.
So you just stick this boy in here.
Oh my God.
Seriously, Intel,
you have how many billions of dollars
to spend on engineering and this is the solution?
This is exactly the kind of precision-engineered jank
that I would expect from Intel.
And then when it's time to get it out,
you use this little lever to pop it up.
Okay, we're not gonna do that right now.
Ridiculous.
Okay, we got a little bit of thermal compound in the socket
but it looks like it mostly fell between the pins
so hopefully this is gonna work.
For RAM, we have 512 gigs
of 4,800 megatransfer per second DDR5.
Which sounds like a lot, but that is a fraction
of the maximum that this server can handle,
thanks to Intel's support
for up to eight channels of DDR5 per CPU
and, unlike AMD's competitor, up to two DIMMs per channel.
That puts the total memory support for this system,
with two CPUs in it, at 12 terabytes.
The frack.
Each CPU also brings 80 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 expansion
to the table, up to five integrated hardware accelerators,
assuming you pay Intel to unlock them,
we'll definitely get to that later.
And on their soon-to-be released Xeon Max series of CPUs,
they're gluing up to 64 gigabytes
of high bandwidth memory 2E directly on the package.
This could end up giving AMD's 3D V-Cache technology
a run for its money.
Coming back to glue for a moment.
This server may only have two sockets in it,
but the highest tier of Sapphire Rapids chips
can glue as many as eight of these chips together
in a single server.
Meaning that you could have
up to 960 threads of computation on a single board,
absolutely dwarfing AMD EPYC,
which is expected to cap out at just two sockets
and 512 threads per system,
even on their upcoming Bergamo CPUs.
That's a lot of cores to dole out to your virtual machines.
Thankfully, you can easily manage
and monitor all that stuff offsite
with Pulseway's mobile app.
It helps you track performance,
and you can get notified if a VM is acting out of turn
and snipe it from the comfort of wherever your phone is.
Not only does Pulseway give you complete control
over your servers and network computers
from any mobile phone or tablet,
but their web app is also great for IT management.
If you need to run updates
or have concerns about CPU temperatures,
Pulseway has intuitive automation tools
for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
This means that you can approach monitoring
across your entire environment
without the need to micromanage every operation.
Now let's get this thing up and running, shall we?
Maybe give Cinebench a go
to get an idea of all core performance?
I hope it actually turns on.
We did not anticipate this.
Dang it, Adam.
- Give 'er a one of these.
- [Linus] Yeah, it's not there.
- [Adam] Not there. - [Linus] I, yeah.
Okay. Well, hold on.
Let's put the shrouds in
before they start trying to blow away the computer.
You have to have the touch.
Uh, it's not turning on.
- [Crew] I got blinking lights.
Yeah, we got, we're blinking up here.
- It's still not turning on.
(computer whirring) Holy (beep)
- [Adam] That's it. That's the noise we want.
- Well, let's see if it actually boots.
We did get it to turn on
but there's a memory training error,
which means it's not seated properly.
So all we can really do,
until we find out where our torque wrench is,
because engineering has it,
is kind of try to get these the same.
Very clever packaging.
This is apparently our torque screwdriver.
Do you happen to have a T-30 bit?
Okay, how do I...
- [Tynan] I don't know. (laughing)
- Oh, you've never used it? - (laughing) No.
- Damn it, Tynan. - I mean, I can just try.
- Well, sure. Yeah.
I mean, you've probably used more torque screwdrivers
than I have. - [Adam] Where's the manual?
- Manual? Why would I use a manual?
I've got- - 'Cause it has-
- people for that. (Tynan laughs)
Okay, inch...
Oh my god.
- Wow, that's fun.
- [Linus] Okay, so how many Newton-meters?
- [Adam] It's 0.904.
- This is is scary. This seems like too much.
- [Adam] Okay, then go...
Do less.
- The good news is, if we brick this thing
we've already benchmarked everything
so we'll just continue the video
and pretend this didn't happen.
Well, one thing we know for sure
is that it's a bit of a finicky socket to install in.
That's good for the dozens of you
who will deal with this to know.
The good news, as I mentioned before,
is that we already tested all this stuff ahead of time,
so, wow what a fast Cinebench render
that we would've been looking at on this monitor.
But wait, a challenger from Team Red approaches.
That's right, we got another server.
And this one is equipped
with a single flagship AMD EPYC 9654.
"But that's not fair, Linus", you might say.
"You can't put two CPUs up against one."
I can and I will.
Two Intel 8468s costs $14,400.
One EPYC 9654 costs around $12,000.
Same number of cores, better price.
And on paper, they even hit similar all core frequencies.
Shall we drag race them?
Well, spoiler, we did it already.
So yes, AMD is faster.
How about a Blender render? Ha ha!
Yes, we did this already and AMD is faster again.
But as interesting as those tests are,
we should really be looking at workloads
that are closer to what these server chips
were actually built for,
like managing databases or virtualization.
Unfortunately for Intel,
the story doesn't really get any rosier here.
Postgres sees Intel get absolutely trounced by AMD.
I mean, losing by that much
in one of the most popular types of databases,
that's a really bad sign.
And what about GROMACS, a molecular dynamic simulator?
Well, here Intel actually manages to pull out a win.
So their high performance compute dreams
might not be totally crushed
until you consider their margin of victory here,
compared to their margin of defeat
in pretty much any other general compute task.
EPYC is just looking like the obvious choice here,
unless you know for a fact
that you're going to run one application and one only
that happens to benefit from Intel's chip design.
And for all the ruckus
that Intel has made about efficiency improvements,
they lose in every single one of our tests.
And we understand that a dual socket system
will use more power than a single socket system.
So this isn't a one-to-one comparison.
But here's the thing,
if AMD only needs a single socket for 96-cores,
well what am I supposed to do?
Hamstring it by saying, "No, you must have more sockets"?
Of course not.
And neither would any decent procurement officer
who's evaluating this hardware for their needs.
If you want a many-core server,
Intel Sapphire Rapids costs more to buy
and costs more to run
and they have no one to blame but themselves.
Today.
But as we said, Intel is laser focused on the future,
and that future is AI.
So they put extra effort into implementing accelerators
for AI inferencing and other common workloads,
directly onto the CPU.
Now if you're a consumer,
the concept of a hardware accelerator
might already be familiar.
Unlike the general purpose cores on your chip,
accelerators are hyper efficient for specific workloads,
but then essentially useless for anything else.
Hardware video decoders, for example,
are what makes it possible to watch YouTube for hours on end
without your phone turning into a hot potato.
But that is all they do and they take up valuable die space.
Intel clearly thought that was worthwhile.
And the first big one they built in is AMX,
which stands for Advanced Matrix Extensions.
Sorry, sorry. (chuckles)
You can think of this one as kind of an evolution
of AVX or Advanced Vector Extensions.
It is ideally going to provide a massive increase
in the CPU's ability to perform AI inference
with Intel citing up to a 10 times improvement over AVX-512.
I mean, to be clear,
this is not gonna replace dedicated accelerators
like NVIDIA's T4 cards,
but it's a lot better than nothing.
So do they win out in a light AI workload then?
That's a yes!
With a capital H-O-L-Y-S-H-I-T!
AMX can perform AI tasks with double
or triple the performance of AVX-512.
That's fast.
Almost as fast as you'll be in our new LTT tracksuit.
In general, the lead over AMD is stark,
even if this doesn't translate to gains
in every AI workload.
And it could prove to be more and more useful
into the future,
as we see small AI tasks sneak their way into software
that might run on a system like this,
as opposed to a dedicated machine learning box
that's stuffed full of GPUs.
What do the rest of these accelerators do?
Well first,
their Data Streaming Accelerator should improve performance
in tasks where data is constantly generated
by hundreds, if not thousands, of sources.
Like logging the telemetry data of many different sensors
that you might be monitoring after a scheduled remote patch
that you initiated with Pulseway.
The In-Memory Analytics Accelerator
moves important analytical calculations of databases
away from the CPU cores.
Then, Intel's Dynamic Load Balancer
is supposed to help manage and distribute work
across the many cores in your CPU.
Finally, QuickAssist Technology accelerates encryption
and compression.
The idea here is pretty sound.
And you can think of it kind of like how Pulseway works.
I know, I keep bringing Pulseway into it.
They sponsored the video, what do you want?
So with Pulseway, you could do everything manually, right?
But it's slower and it's less efficient.
So you can think of Pulseway
as kind of like a hardware accelerator for your workspace.
You spend some of your time
using their intuitive automation workflow,
then your repetitive tasks run on autopilot,
allowing you to focus your brain power on important things.
Which improves productivity or saves power,
whichever appeals to you more.
The thing is though,
while we would love to put all of these accelerators,
little time savers, efficiency makers to the test,
it's still early days
and software support simply isn't there yet
and it might never get there.
It all depends on whether organizations end up making use
of these accelerators.
There is one feature though, that Intel has ready at launch
and it's got their shareholders abuzz,
even if nobody else is impressed.
It's called Intel On Demand.
And frankly, calling it a feature seems kind of generous.
What it does, is it allows customers to upgrade their CPUs
by paying Intel to unlock the hardware accelerators
that are already in the silicon on the chip,
but are blocked through software.
The most charitable possible take here,
is that this will allow enterprise customers
to save a buck at the time of purchase,
and then upgrade their chips down the line
to accelerate new workloads.
No need to remove, replace,
and reconfigure a brand new server, which can be a hassle,
especially with how finicky these CPUs are. (chuckles)
You just unlock the features you need
and you're on your way,
massively reducing the time to value for customers.
Well, that's great, right?
Savings on initial purchases is a good thing.
Well, kind of.
Except that, at risk of painting
their entire 52 SKU lineup with a broad brush,
Sapphire Rapids is a pretty bad deal upfront.
And that's even before you pay Intel's ransom
for unlocking the hardware they already sold you.
I mean, I'm not sure how it happened,
but Intel managed to price their top end chip 50% higher
than AMDs which, as we've already discussed,
kind of dunks on it.
So then how is it that Intel still has so much
of the enterprise market
and why aren't more customers crossing the line over to AMD?
Well, it's a combination of factors.
First up is long-term deals.
Many of these Sapphire Rapid CPUs were purchased long ago
and customers have just been waiting through the delays
for them to finally be delivered.
Intel also has both the manufacturing capacity
and the engineering staff
to support the kinds of customers
who buy chips in the hundreds or the thousands
or even the tens of thousands,
rather than one by one like you or I might do.
Over the next couple of years though,
it's clear that AMD is going to continue
to consume Intel's valuable data center market share,
especially in servers that rely on general purpose,
high core count CPUs.
For specific workloads
that can take advantage of Intel's accelerators though,
AMD has a lot of work to do
and it's going to take some time, but that's okay.
They've clearly got it.
And as bad as Intel's quarterly results and forecast look,
so do they.
I mean, turning a ship as big as Intel takes years
and they have plenty of cash on hand
to navigate this rough patch.
I mean, look at AMD.
Many were skeptical
that they would ever be able to turn it around
after their embarrassing bulldozer line of CPUs.
But a CEO swap, and five or six years later,
the company was fully revitalized
as they began launching product after product
that made Intel shake in their boots.
Like what's happening now.
Thanks again to Pulseway.
When it comes to monitoring and management,
these folks are great.
So if you're an MSP, or you just wanna be able
to keep tabs on your system while you're out at dinner,
Pulseway has your back.
They're hooking up LTT viewers with a no risk-free trial.
So check them out at the link in the video description.
Thanks to AMD
for getting Intel to actually start competing again.
And thanks to Pulseway for sponsoring this video.
Right now they're hooking up our viewers with a free trial.
So if you want to use Pulseway
to manage your devices like we do,
check them out in the video description.