In response to the EPYC’s escalating focus on server processors, Intel has issued an announcement that it will discontinue several Cascade Lake Xeon models along with the downgrading of other models.
The Intel Cascade Lake Xeon M-Series will no longer be manufactured
Meanwhile, Intel built the M-Series models using the same silicon as the standard Xeon processors, however with a sharp price increase of $3,000 over standard chips. In return, customers received up to 2TB of storage capacity per chip, a significant increase over the 1TB of storage support on standard models. This did not yet match the maximum capacity of 4 TB of AMD EPYC Rom processors, which is available free of charge.
An Intel representative said that these price reductions were the result of customer feedback and that the company will now offer its L-series models, which support 4.5TB of capacity, at the same prices as the M models, which are no longer manufactured.
This will result in a significant price reduction for Xeon customers who require more storage capacity or are considering the introduction of high-capacity Optane DIMMs. Again, L-Series models are built with the same silicon as standard Xeon models, but before the change, customers had to pay $7,897 more to upgrade to L-Series models that support up to 4.5TB of storage capacity (because Optane DIMMS are used).
Intel’s Optane DC-DIMMs with persistent memory also come into play. It is generally believed that these modules are slow to adopt, mainly because not all workloads benefit from the new technology that uses persistent memory instead of DRAM. Workloads that do benefit will require significant re-encoding to optimize applications and achieve maximum performance from the new technology, not to mention validation costs. This represents a large up-front investment required for the introduction of Optane DC, and many companies are still somewhat reluctant to make this investment at this time.
Each Rome processor supports up to 4TB of memory per socket (two DIMMs per channel) at no extra charge. This is a great advantage that AMD has right now. It certainly makes it difficult for companies to pay $3,003 more than the already higher price of Intel than AMD and still not achieve the same memory capacity as EPYC.
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