AMD EPYC 3251 Benchmarks and Review the Challenger We Need

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WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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A few bits here:
  • I think the few hundred total is correct. I think $300-400 may be a bit high. Take the A2SDI-4C-HLN4F as an example where the entire board sells at retail for under $270. List on the C3558 is $86 which means sub $200 for the board in that example.
  • Most of these products are not meant to be bought on NewEgg/ Amazon. You are likely spending more to get one off parts from an etailer. They also move so slowly that vendors have trouble stocking them at Amazon.
  • I do think that part of the pricing formula is a markup on COGS.
  • Volume on these embedded parts tends to be lower than mainstream server platforms. There are other vendors I know out there doing runs of 200-500 boards at a time only.
Single die EPYC 3251 has lower component coats coats than dual die. Fewer PCIe, NIC, and RAM slots need to be placed as an example. I think that you could see a $600 ish board with the CPU if there is a customer with a decent volume OEM'ing the platform. The flip side is that someone needs to invest in all of the BIOS, firmware, and software validation work for the AMD platforms. Even if it is not much, spread over low volumes it adds up.
Intel have a long and distinguished history of shutting out competition through sweetheart deals, rebates and retaliatory action to big OEMs - if anyone remembered back in the mid-2000s they were sued by AMD for shutting them out of mobile markets, and either won, or got a huge settlement from them. The weird silence from the usual OEMs can simply be due to the vendors being threatened with reduced shipment of Xeons And Coffee Lake/Whiskey Lake chips (already in short supply) if they try to support AMD too much.
 

diskdiddler

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Mar 3, 2017
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Intel have a long and distinguished history of shutting out competition through sweetheart deals, rebates and retaliatory action to big OEMs - if anyone remembered back in the mid-2000s they were sued by AMD for shutting them out of mobile markets, and either won, or got a huge settlement from them. The weird silence from the usual OEMs can simply be due to the vendors being threatened with reduced shipment of Xeons And Coffee Lake/Whiskey Lake chips (already in short supply) if they try to support AMD too much.
I really hope this isn't the case, buy boy is there a major major lack of these chips in boards out there. Its becoming a problem.

Wish someone knew more and would advise.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I have not heard that to be an issue here. AMD is winning in some non-standard form factors (e.g. actual embedded systems not mITX motherboards) about at the rate one would expect for essentially a new entrant in the market.

Intel also has more SKUs and existing board designs already in the market so I think ODMs are hesitating to go through another design cycle on channel boards.
 
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