500,000 Intel Xeon Scalable already sold

That's just a heck lot of CPUs! Just WOW. Did the 28-core part already see the light of day?

lol that ad feels like it came from the late 1990s. Also, their "$ / Raw Clock" isn't really the best metric. The more stark realization is the 8180M is $464.68 per core. For just 4 fewer cores in the 8168, it drops down to $203.75 per core. Still ridiculously expensive, but not to the point where Intel is basically mocking you for buying it. Though what really boggles my mind is why anyone would buy the 8156, at $1751.75 per core. What exactly does that have that makes it so special? Even the "$ / Raw Clock" value looks terrible for that model. Meanwhile, the 4114 is actually a pretty decent price for what you get. Roughly $70 per core. Cheesy ads and horrendous pricing aside, the 8180M is a legitimately impressive product.

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/05/intels-new-scalable-xeon-branding-just-price-increase/ No Optane support for those prices? Whats all that about OLTP? Anyone really going to choose x86 over SPARC or a real mainframe for OLTP? The only nice thing about this release is AVX-512 and the potential for the highest end CPUs to scale to 8 sockets gluelessly. Thats not new or unique though. E7s have done that for years. SPARC or ARM would be better for scale up anyway. ARM and Epyc both have 48bit physical addressing and Intel is still using 46bit. Epyc also has 2TB per socket vs 1.5, 128 PCI-e lanes vs 48, and fully encrypted memory(so does Ryzen Pro). Intel gas nothing to compete with that at all. Epyc is a way better value.

Though what really boggles my mind is why anyone would buy the 8156, at $1751.75 per core. What exactly does that have that makes it so special? Even the "$ / Raw Clock" value looks terrible for that model.

The 8156 has a lot more L3 cache per core (4.125MB per core), next up would be the 8158 with half that L3 per core, and all other "Platinum" CPUs (ie. 8xxx) with 1.375MB per core "only", which I suppose might be relevant for some applications. These server SKUs are partly highly specialized, and there is no "one size fits all" CPU in this space, even if money is no object.

anandtech has a review, well part of one, of the new Skylake-SP's with EPYC 7000 series CPUs. Good read.