Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Intel Xeon Returns!”.
You know what hey, if we’re going to talk about, workstation grade Hardware, why don’t we talk about Intel’s entry or, I should say re-entry to the workstation Market? It’S not that you couldn’t buy a workstation chip from Intel. You just couldn’t buy a sensible one until now, they’ve launched their fourth generation xeonw 3400 and 2400 series processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, and these are looking a lot more exciting than what uh hold on have they launched the server chips yet. Well you look for that. Someone actually said a really interesting video idea.
Um shattered Sky said we need a video about the total amount spent on parts for PCs used for random things in the office. Someone going around and just totaling the it spend, assuming you had to buy everything new in the office would actually just be wild yeah. I don’t think it’s a video we could do, though I’ve noticed there’s just a lot of anytime. I talk about money like yeah. We had a short circuit video a little while ago, where I forget what it was. It was like a game console or like something. It was like hundreds of dollars and I was like that’s a lot of money and the comments are full of people being like uh uh, not for you, Tech, CEO media Elite, whatever going okay, um and then you know you’ll and then on the on the other End of the spectrum you’ll go okay.
This isn’t like a used, motherboard CPU Ram combo for 75 bucks. That’S not a lot of money and people will go. Oh I’m! Actually that’s a lot of money for a lot of people, so it’s like okay! Okay! So, if there’s basically no sort of way that we can agree on what is or isn’t a lot of money, because you might not agree from your own perspective or you might not think that what I’m saying should be valid from my own perspective, the new policy With the writing team that I’ve kind of outlined is we just cannot talk about money in anything other than objective terms in subjective terms, money talk is, is banned, so you can still talk about performance per dollar. Yeah and part of that is part of that comes from, I don’t think necessarily with the wancho audience, but from a lot of people getting a um like a bad taste in their mouth. When we do talk about how much things cost around here uh and in a in a Mainline video, I just don’t, I just don’t think we would do it totaling up how much all my computers cost, I think, gets dangerously close to just like flexing content.
At least in the eyes of a lot of people – and I don’t – I don’t see it as something that we would that we would be able to to do without leaving a bad taste in some people’s mouths. I would, I would legitimately be interested I’d, be fine. I’D find it interesting, I would even want it yeah filmed like pretty like not that sophisticated way I would just want to like have a Handycam following someone as they go up to each workstation with like a laptop, which is like total the value and just keep Going – and you just see it like creep up throughout the video – I think that would be cool plane.
Chat’S blowing up. They want to do an exclusive exclusive yeah too much work. It would take a while that would take five ever there’s so many computers deployed in such a wide variety of ways, like every person who works here, has a workstation at least one. So it’s over a hundred yeah. It’S it’s not happening um anyway, so right. So I was talking about Sapphire Rapids and I wasn’t sure if the Embargo had lifted on the server chips it looks like it has.
So the workstation ones look a lot more impressive and exciting to me than the server ones did and the reason for that is that we get some of the same benefits of the server chips. So nice High Core accounts they’re all performance cores, unlike Intel’s mainstream chips which have performance and efficiency cores in them. For the last couple of generations, they are overclockable, which is super exciting. So this is kind of like uh.
These workstation chips are kind of a spiritual successor to their old Core X Series chips. They have adequate pcie Lanes, let’s go yeah, there’s a lot 64 Gen 5 lanes for the 2400 series, 112 lanes for the w3400 series, that’s wild and unlike Core X and unlike mainstream threadripper, that’s not threadripper pro. The mainstream. Xeon 2400 line supports up to two terabytes of quad Channel ECC memory, so that was a big limitation for threadripper.
That made it not really suitable. For many professional workloads is how little Ram you could install on the platform while Intel’s coming in and going sure, put in more RAM, I guess and on the high-end ones. You can do four terabytes of 8 Channel ECC ddr5. Now they don’t have the same kinds of core counts as AMD.
It only goes up to 20, something, oh, it doesn’t say: darn it uh Main Street, ah mainstream stream, skew table here we go. It only goes up to 24 cores on the mainstream, lineup and 56 cores on the the professional or what do they call it expert lineup, but these are fast cores. These are really fast course, and I really like the pricing particularly of the 2400 series, if what you needed was basically what Intel had. So you know anywhere from 16, 12, 10, 12, 16, 24 cores, which is enough for the vast majority of workloads but you’re, just frustrated by the lack of memory, bandwidth or total memory capacity on those, unlike the consumer chips, or particularly frustrated by the lack of pcie Lanes, yes, like the first thing I thought when I saw these lists of specs was like that’s a lot of lanes.
Well, exactly right, because mainstream platforms now are what 20 24 28 Lanes. That’S all you get and when the expectation is that you’re going to be using up 16 of them for your GPU, which makes sense the second you go and think okay. Well, I want to put a high speed network card in here or that’s a big part of the reason I did sign off on those threadripper Pro in gestations. You know why lanes because, as soon as you put high speed like, I think they have uh 25 gig network cards in them, so that we can ingest at high speed to the server they have a bunch of USB uh controller cards, the multi-controller ones, so that You can actually do more than just okay, so if you put a 10 gig USB card in your system, it’ll do 10 gig total.
So if you have multiple devices plugged in they all share that bandwidth and it’s it’s not that staple, whereas you can get these multi-controller cards, so each Port is on its own controller. So for something like an ingestation where we are ingesting hundreds of gigs or sometimes terabytes of media at a time off of a whole bunch of different sources, we need all those inputs and in order to get full bandwidth out of them and not have run into Stability or just speed bottlenecks. Well, you need more lanes and it was the only freaking platform that made any sense at the time. Whereas now I would just go with this zlw 2400 series and I don’t even have to buy 32 cores or whatever you can get.
One with as few as six cores for 400 bucks and yeah, the motherboards will be expensive, but that’s still a relatively affordable platform. If all I need is some freaking pcie Lanes, I love it. I’M excited about it and I’m especially excited because I have been so frustrated by amd’s, complete and utter lies AMD lied. They said, hey sorry about the first threadripper platform.
Um, you know we. I know we promised that you guys were gon na, have a long upgrade path on this, but we really had to change it for threadriper 3000. We got to do this new Tiara strx, whatever it was uh. We need this new platform and we need this new socket so you’re not going to enjoy the same backwards and forwards compatibility that the mainstream saw on am5, but we’ll make it up to you. This is a long-term platform and you’re going to get CPU upgrades. That was they just didn’t, and you know what is so. That is most offensive about it. There are, there are leaks of threadripper, non-pro 5000 chips, engineering samples out there.
They did the work yeah, they just decided, you don’t get it ah, forget it yeah, forget it. Those chips would have gone into this platform, but instead they went and they did threadripper Pro. They made it Lenovo exclusive. For, however long and it’s like yeah, I I get it the volumes of threadripper compared to the the money that they could make on.
You know making it only threadripper Pro and selling through system integrators or whatever else might have made sense from a business standpoint, but they made a lot of enthusiasts angry with them, myself included, so I’m mad there you go um and yeah, I’m just I’m just excited That uh, I’m just excited that Intel is, is bringing the fight to them. Do I think that Xeon 2400 and 3400 series are going to take a bite out of AMD in this in this segment? I doubt hugely not necessarily especially because we know from epic Genoa, so that’s amd’s, current server platform that AMD can do 96 96 Zen 4 cores on a single chip I mean threadripper has always just been mini. Epic, like cut slightly cut down epic, so it’s possible that they’re going to bring out a threadripper pro later this year. That’S going to make sapphire Rapids just look utterly stupid, but I still hope that this is Intel forcing them to respond and that we’re gon na see the fight heat up in this segment. Yeah, it’s exciting, see, gustavors, says: threadripper is kind of pointless. If you need server performance, you buy a server chip.
You can use windows with server chips, you don’t get it server. Chips are not overclockable for one thing: server chips are designed for stability. First, okay, they don’t have the same kind of flexibility that something like a threadripper did and server platforms, perhaps more importantly, are not designed for desktop use like epic is an SOC. Epic is not a uh, a CPU in the same way that other CPUs are, and the Epic platform is very different from the threadripper platform. Did you ever notice, for example, that on Epic motherboards there’s no, i o well, that’s because it’s an SOC, it doesn’t have a chipset that it’s attached to that’s one of the reasons that epic, the at least the the first three generations had no support for onboard Raid did you know that, even because there was no chipset makes sense, there’s no chipset on the board, whereas threadripper supported things like AMD raid, for example, which you might want in a workstation environment. It had proper support for more USB, for example.
So it’s it. That is spoken out of ignorance, saying that if you need that performance, you need lots of people do things that are desktop things and that are not server things with many core chips. So no that is actually factually incorrect. What you said – and it is excellent – that we are seeing um a return, we’re seeing better attentiveness to the workstation market and the Enthusiast Market. The other thing that threadripper did, that AMD won the hearts and minds of many enthusiasts with. Is it made many core CPUs affordable to people who otherwise couldn’t access that Hardware, people like students who were studying machine learning or Machine Vision or any other CPU intensive workload or we’re in a scientific program, but couldn’t afford a you know, five thousand dollar Xeon CPU Or whatever else they could go and buy a threadripper and yeah it couldn’t support as much memory or whatever, but they could overclock the snot out of it and they could at least run their workloads or people who are running home labs, for example like yeah. No, I don’t need full fat. I don’t need full fat epic for this, because it’s not going into production environment, but this really allows me to evaluate the architecture or whatever else like. Ah, it was a. It was a big.
It was a big loogie in the face of their most hardcore Enthusiast users and it sucks yeah .