The Convergence of Workstation and Server Parts: A New Era for AMD and Intel

As we move forward in the world of computing, it's becoming increasingly clear that the lines between workstation parts and server parts are blurring. This convergence is not just a passing trend, but rather a fundamental shift in the way companies approach hardware design. In this article, we'll explore the reasons behind this shift and what it means for AMD and Intel.

The Merging of Workstation and Server Parts

AMD's recent launch of the Zen 2 architecture has sent shockwaves through the industry, with many predicting that workstation parts will soon be designed to meet the same demands as server parts. The idea of merging these two markets may seem daunting at first, but it's actually a natural progression for companies like AMD and Intel. As consumers become increasingly demanding, they're no longer satisfied with slow clock speeds or limited processing power. Instead, they want fast, efficient hardware that can handle even the most complex tasks.

The Role of Market Forces

Market forces are driving this convergence, and AMD is leading the charge. By designing parts that can handle multiple workloads, including server and workstation applications, AMD is targeting a broader market segment. This approach has several benefits, including increased competition and innovation. With more companies vying for attention, we're seeing a wider range of products with improved performance and efficiency.

The Decline of Intel's Socket 12

Meanwhile, Intel's socket 12 design, which was once the standard for high-end workstations, is slowly fading away. The company has shifted its focus to smaller, more efficient designs that can handle multiple cores and threads. While this may not be as exciting as a 28-core machine with phase-change cooling, it's actually a sign of Intel's willingness to adapt to changing market demands.

The Rise of Financial Institutions

One area where we're seeing the convergence of workstation and server parts is in financial institutions. These organizations require highly specialized hardware that can handle complex transactions and large amounts of data. Intel has already launched a 28-core machine with phase-change cooling, which is specifically designed for this niche market. AMD, meanwhile, has focused on delivering more affordable options like the Ryzen Threadripper, which offers 32 cores at an attractive price.

The Power of Cache

Another factor driving this convergence is the increasing importance of cache memory. As computing demands grow, so too do the sizes of our caches. Intel's recent demo showcased a machine with 28 cores and 16 phases of power, highlighting the need for efficient cooling solutions. Meanwhile, AMD has focused on optimizing its Zen 2 architecture to deliver more cache bandwidth and faster clock speeds.

The Epic Market

One area where we're seeing the convergence of workstation and server parts is in the epic market. This refers to high-end workstations that can handle demanding tasks like video editing and 3D modeling. AMD's recent launch of the Ryzen Threadripper has brought these machines within reach of gamers and content creators, who are eager for fast, efficient hardware.

The Zen 2 Architecture

So what does the future hold for workstation parts? One thing is clear: we're seeing a shift towards more efficient designs that can handle multiple cores and threads. AMD's Zen 2 architecture has been instrumental in this shift, delivering fast clock speeds and improved power management. The company's focus on IPC (instructions per cycle) and power consumption will be critical in driving innovation forward.

GTX 1180: A New Era for NVIDIA

As we look to the future of workstation parts, it's worth noting that NVIDIA has been quietly working on its own architecture. The GTX 1180 is a powerful machine that offers unprecedented performance and efficiency. While details are still scarce, one thing is clear: this will be an exciting product that pushes the boundaries of what's possible in the world of computing.

In conclusion, the convergence of workstation and server parts is a natural progression for companies like AMD and Intel. By designing parts that can handle multiple workloads, these companies are targeting a broader market segment and driving innovation forward. As we look to the future of workstation parts, one thing is clear: it's going to be an exciting ride.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entravel expenses for Computex 2018 paid for in part by fractal design yeah if you haven't seen our coverage of the fractal define r6 you should gotta check out our videos on the Defiant r6 we've done a three dripper build we've done a 9-iron build it's cool it's quiet its competent it's a really awesome case and you should check out our videos on that travel expenses for Computex also paid in part by asrock yes as rock with the many PCs and graphics cards and abstracts just building everything these days whether you swing team red or team Blue has Rock has got something for you I think so be sure to check out our coverage of all of their motherboards everything from iommu groups to full UEFI tours which I know only the people that are basically getting ready to pull the trigger look at those UEFI everybody else doesn't care so big thanks to asrock for sponsoring us and you really should check out our other coverage of asrock products and our coverage from Computex 2018 you know I've been thinking this context has got to be the weirdest Computex ever because we get thread Ripper AMD 32 cores remember - we've got Intel talking about an unnamed 28 core part that is in all likelihood some type of Xeon that's based on sky like X but what's not here Z 390 chipset from Intel and the 8 core coffee like parts which we're pretty sure exists I mean I don't know I don't have any inside knowledge but everybody was pretty tight-lipped when I asked about Z 390 so I get the feeling that it's probably under NDA now they say hindsight is 20/20 but you know looking back I don't really see a lot of difference between the trigger per socket and the easy on socket quad-channel memory versus a hex channel memory okay maybe the Xenon sockets a little more high-end a little more future-proof but maybe what we are seeing really is sort of the merging of high-end server parts and the desktop parts because you've got really nowhere else to go I mean if you think about it like the Intel the Xeon e5 2670 you know Sandy Bridge that's five year old part that's basically where we're at with mainstream desktop parts and so thinking back when socket 478 launched I thought so I get 470 it's kind of anemic for an eight core CPU I mean eight cores duals channel memory and the dual chanting the IMC did actually prove to be a little bit problematic it was a little slow and so I mean that was the biggest improvement in Zen plus was fixing the memory controller so what have we really you know learned in the retrospective maybe triple channel memory would have been the way to go for the mainstream platform but you know I don't think so at least not with the be 350 chipset I mean that's where Intel and Athey are really duking it out it's not a high-end it's the mid-range and the fact that OMS are investing in laptops and you know low-power devices like that I think that is a good signal for AMD future aim you can leverage his strengths in the fact that it's much smaller than Intel to pull off a win okay so I can 478 8 cores it's making a lot more sense to me and now with Intel basically launching eight cores on coffee lake or coffee like eight cores or getting ready to although not at this Computex and so you think about eight cores eight cores on the anemic desktop on the low-cost desktop and all of a sudden you know Intel's coming with the eight core but until is riding behind the thing that they demoed was basically a recycled server part now to be fair that could also describe the thread Ripper thirty-two core I mean you know there are 32 core epics that are available right now Zen plus is what we need for the memory controller and that kind of thing so really if just if this is a 16 core thread Ripper that's 227 hundreds on one piece of silicon that can hit four point three gigahertz I'm gonna be so happy I mean I'm just gonna be so so happy because you think back and you know those last generations eons only the last generation or two halves eons that even just kiss four gigahertz let alone beyond four gigahertz and so it feels like just in a quick short time with for seeing desktop like mainstream processors at four and five gigahertz until did launch the 8086 K which is five gigahertz out of the box but it's really just a bend 8700 K and you know the numbers are somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of 8700 KS would hit that 5 gigahertz out of the box I'm super disappointed that Intel did not do the soldered he sank I'm given to understand if they experimented with soldered heatsink but ultimately decided that they didn't need to soldered heatsink so really until launched a CPU that they already long it's just an anniversary edition it's just labeling really I mean ok it's been slightly faster but there's between 50 and 80 percent chance that you could do that anyway I'm pretty sure that the z3 on t boards are gonna support TDPS of 110 to 125 watts don't know I just know that from sort of poking at things during the show but it really does suggest that we're gonna see market segmentation that really is just the commodity low-cost desktop parts the socket 478 parts and the coffee-like parts and server parts and not really anything in between I think that's good news for AMD because Amy didn't try to have some sort of intermediate socket between the crazy TR for socket and socket 478 but if you look at the Pentium sockets I mean the the you know 3467 xeon socket that's just as crazy as the AMD socket it's just a server platform so maybe I guess X 299 was a cost-saving measure because only quad-core but you know here we are what did that really buy it bought one product cycle what did the press release at Computex really buy just another another press cycle another you know 8086 k out in the press and that's really all you get so I think that that sort of the merging of workstation parts and server parts is sort of inevitable I think the market I think consumers want that and I think market forces because if AMD is driving that but that means that one of Intel's market segments is basically going to go away because you're gonna have a cool coffee lake on the you know mainstream crap desktop and then 12 16 24 32 cores on both the workstation desktop and in the dual socket version of that for servers car speeds is a little bit more of a mystery what we see four gigahertz clock speeds on Epic I kind of doubt it so then the question becomes why have only seen this on server parts before and the answer is we kind of have only kind of habit so it turns out that there are four core yeah four core CPUs from Intel that are designed for quad socket servers and those don't really have the clock speeds but they have a crazy amount of cache because you can't do it in clock speed you can at least do it in cash insanely huge caches so that's what they're done for the ten twenty thousand dollar CPUs that are designed for for socket system so you run for four core CPUs you have 16 total cores and 4 sockets on a motherboard the size of Rhode Island still you know just barely kissing at 4 gigahertz clock speed so there must be another reason well other than it's crazy expensive to fabricate something like that and the answer was in the Intel demo 28 core demo 16 phases of power no data center customer on earth is going to deal with racks and racks and racks at that and that's one of the reasons why I think it's kind of funny I think AMD was really listening to the data center customers I think that the Zen was sort of a happy accident for laptop users and everything else because really you look at it and you look at Vega Vega and the rise in desktop parts are focused on efficiency not clock speed because most of AMD's customers would be customers in the data center but there's an inertia with that the data center people are not gonna adopt those products immediately it's gonna take a full you know three to five year product cycle so in the meantime Andy's got to deliver something that works at the medium low end that's the four core CCX because let's face it four cores is enough and again it's like four cores with the socket for Saturday 8 that seems kind of anemic that doesn't seem like it's forward-thinking enough it turns out that it's actually very forward-thinking because in order to get into the the epic marketplace at a but at a pretty good clip you've got to be able to demonstrate it at the at the smaller scale as well and so you know what proof of this do I have really just anecdotes you know 26 70s and I'm so fond of on eBay yeah 2.7 gigahertz 3.3 overclock the reason that data centers remove those were twofold one virtualization bug to power usage when we're talking V 3 V 4 Zeon's versus that you know launched a Sandy Bridge they didn't have power management figured out at all so as much as the cost of electricity is for various reasons thrown out those V 1 Sandy Bridge CPUs and replacing them with more efficient V 3 V 4 CPUs worked out pretty well and I think cash uses less power than clock speed at those higher clocks on CPUs as well but I don't know this is just me and rambling this is this is just my opinion but I think it's fascinating that we didn't see the 8 core desktop part but we saw a recycled server part that no server business will ever want like if Intel can deliver a 2000 watt that's a very niche part just like the parts that have 80 Meg's of l3 cache and 4 cores those are those are basically built for one customer financial institutions and that sort of thing similarly a 28 core machine that can hit 5 gigahertz but only under phase change cooling that is built for one customer and it's not worth Intel's time for that one customer in that case whereas financial institutions will happily pay $20,000 up upwards of $20,000 a chip for custom silicon gamers are not going to pay that whereas what imd has right now today exists and it might not hit five gigahertz but 32 cores is already there 32 core thread report ooze is epic with some clock speed tweaks and some memory controller tweaks it is what epic based on Zen plus will be and that's an honestly very exciting I wanted to get into some thoughts on the gtx 1180 but i think i've already ran a little bit long so i'm gonna leave you with thattravel expenses for Computex 2018 paid for in part by fractal design yeah if you haven't seen our coverage of the fractal define r6 you should gotta check out our videos on the Defiant r6 we've done a three dripper build we've done a 9-iron build it's cool it's quiet its competent it's a really awesome case and you should check out our videos on that travel expenses for Computex also paid in part by asrock yes as rock with the many PCs and graphics cards and abstracts just building everything these days whether you swing team red or team Blue has Rock has got something for you I think so be sure to check out our coverage of all of their motherboards everything from iommu groups to full UEFI tours which I know only the people that are basically getting ready to pull the trigger look at those UEFI everybody else doesn't care so big thanks to asrock for sponsoring us and you really should check out our other coverage of asrock products and our coverage from Computex 2018 you know I've been thinking this context has got to be the weirdest Computex ever because we get thread Ripper AMD 32 cores remember - we've got Intel talking about an unnamed 28 core part that is in all likelihood some type of Xeon that's based on sky like X but what's not here Z 390 chipset from Intel and the 8 core coffee like parts which we're pretty sure exists I mean I don't know I don't have any inside knowledge but everybody was pretty tight-lipped when I asked about Z 390 so I get the feeling that it's probably under NDA now they say hindsight is 20/20 but you know looking back I don't really see a lot of difference between the trigger per socket and the easy on socket quad-channel memory versus a hex channel memory okay maybe the Xenon sockets a little more high-end a little more future-proof but maybe what we are seeing really is sort of the merging of high-end server parts and the desktop parts because you've got really nowhere else to go I mean if you think about it like the Intel the Xeon e5 2670 you know Sandy Bridge that's five year old part that's basically where we're at with mainstream desktop parts and so thinking back when socket 478 launched I thought so I get 470 it's kind of anemic for an eight core CPU I mean eight cores duals channel memory and the dual chanting the IMC did actually prove to be a little bit problematic it was a little slow and so I mean that was the biggest improvement in Zen plus was fixing the memory controller so what have we really you know learned in the retrospective maybe triple channel memory would have been the way to go for the mainstream platform but you know I don't think so at least not with the be 350 chipset I mean that's where Intel and Athey are really duking it out it's not a high-end it's the mid-range and the fact that OMS are investing in laptops and you know low-power devices like that I think that is a good signal for AMD future aim you can leverage his strengths in the fact that it's much smaller than Intel to pull off a win okay so I can 478 8 cores it's making a lot more sense to me and now with Intel basically launching eight cores on coffee lake or coffee like eight cores or getting ready to although not at this Computex and so you think about eight cores eight cores on the anemic desktop on the low-cost desktop and all of a sudden you know Intel's coming with the eight core but until is riding behind the thing that they demoed was basically a recycled server part now to be fair that could also describe the thread Ripper thirty-two core I mean you know there are 32 core epics that are available right now Zen plus is what we need for the memory controller and that kind of thing so really if just if this is a 16 core thread Ripper that's 227 hundreds on one piece of silicon that can hit four point three gigahertz I'm gonna be so happy I mean I'm just gonna be so so happy because you think back and you know those last generations eons only the last generation or two halves eons that even just kiss four gigahertz let alone beyond four gigahertz and so it feels like just in a quick short time with for seeing desktop like mainstream processors at four and five gigahertz until did launch the 8086 K which is five gigahertz out of the box but it's really just a bend 8700 K and you know the numbers are somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of 8700 KS would hit that 5 gigahertz out of the box I'm super disappointed that Intel did not do the soldered he sank I'm given to understand if they experimented with soldered heatsink but ultimately decided that they didn't need to soldered heatsink so really until launched a CPU that they already long it's just an anniversary edition it's just labeling really I mean ok it's been slightly faster but there's between 50 and 80 percent chance that you could do that anyway I'm pretty sure that the z3 on t boards are gonna support TDPS of 110 to 125 watts don't know I just know that from sort of poking at things during the show but it really does suggest that we're gonna see market segmentation that really is just the commodity low-cost desktop parts the socket 478 parts and the coffee-like parts and server parts and not really anything in between I think that's good news for AMD because Amy didn't try to have some sort of intermediate socket between the crazy TR for socket and socket 478 but if you look at the Pentium sockets I mean the the you know 3467 xeon socket that's just as crazy as the AMD socket it's just a server platform so maybe I guess X 299 was a cost-saving measure because only quad-core but you know here we are what did that really buy it bought one product cycle what did the press release at Computex really buy just another another press cycle another you know 8086 k out in the press and that's really all you get so I think that that sort of the merging of workstation parts and server parts is sort of inevitable I think the market I think consumers want that and I think market forces because if AMD is driving that but that means that one of Intel's market segments is basically going to go away because you're gonna have a cool coffee lake on the you know mainstream crap desktop and then 12 16 24 32 cores on both the workstation desktop and in the dual socket version of that for servers car speeds is a little bit more of a mystery what we see four gigahertz clock speeds on Epic I kind of doubt it so then the question becomes why have only seen this on server parts before and the answer is we kind of have only kind of habit so it turns out that there are four core yeah four core CPUs from Intel that are designed for quad socket servers and those don't really have the clock speeds but they have a crazy amount of cache because you can't do it in clock speed you can at least do it in cash insanely huge caches so that's what they're done for the ten twenty thousand dollar CPUs that are designed for for socket system so you run for four core CPUs you have 16 total cores and 4 sockets on a motherboard the size of Rhode Island still you know just barely kissing at 4 gigahertz clock speed so there must be another reason well other than it's crazy expensive to fabricate something like that and the answer was in the Intel demo 28 core demo 16 phases of power no data center customer on earth is going to deal with racks and racks and racks at that and that's one of the reasons why I think it's kind of funny I think AMD was really listening to the data center customers I think that the Zen was sort of a happy accident for laptop users and everything else because really you look at it and you look at Vega Vega and the rise in desktop parts are focused on efficiency not clock speed because most of AMD's customers would be customers in the data center but there's an inertia with that the data center people are not gonna adopt those products immediately it's gonna take a full you know three to five year product cycle so in the meantime Andy's got to deliver something that works at the medium low end that's the four core CCX because let's face it four cores is enough and again it's like four cores with the socket for Saturday 8 that seems kind of anemic that doesn't seem like it's forward-thinking enough it turns out that it's actually very forward-thinking because in order to get into the the epic marketplace at a but at a pretty good clip you've got to be able to demonstrate it at the at the smaller scale as well and so you know what proof of this do I have really just anecdotes you know 26 70s and I'm so fond of on eBay yeah 2.7 gigahertz 3.3 overclock the reason that data centers remove those were twofold one virtualization bug to power usage when we're talking V 3 V 4 Zeon's versus that you know launched a Sandy Bridge they didn't have power management figured out at all so as much as the cost of electricity is for various reasons thrown out those V 1 Sandy Bridge CPUs and replacing them with more efficient V 3 V 4 CPUs worked out pretty well and I think cash uses less power than clock speed at those higher clocks on CPUs as well but I don't know this is just me and rambling this is this is just my opinion but I think it's fascinating that we didn't see the 8 core desktop part but we saw a recycled server part that no server business will ever want like if Intel can deliver a 2000 watt that's a very niche part just like the parts that have 80 Meg's of l3 cache and 4 cores those are those are basically built for one customer financial institutions and that sort of thing similarly a 28 core machine that can hit 5 gigahertz but only under phase change cooling that is built for one customer and it's not worth Intel's time for that one customer in that case whereas financial institutions will happily pay $20,000 up upwards of $20,000 a chip for custom silicon gamers are not going to pay that whereas what imd has right now today exists and it might not hit five gigahertz but 32 cores is already there 32 core thread report ooze is epic with some clock speed tweaks and some memory controller tweaks it is what epic based on Zen plus will be and that's an honestly very exciting I wanted to get into some thoughts on the gtx 1180 but i think i've already ran a little bit long so i'm gonna leave you with that\n"