Intel’s got some high priced chips, but none is as expensive as the new Xeon E7-8894 v4 server processor.
No Intel chip is as expensive as the new Xeon E7-8894 v4 server processor.
The US$8,898 Xeon chip has massive horsepower with 24 cores, 60MB of cache and a maximum clock frequency of 3.4GHz. Intel said this is the company’s fastest server chip, breaking enterprise application speed records.
The company’s next expensive chip after the E7-8894 v4 is its other 24-core processor, the Xeon E7-8890 v4, which is priced at $7,174. The chips have similar features except for the base clock speed. The new chip starts at 2.4GHz compared to 2.2GHz for the less expensive chip.
The $8,898 chip even outprices Intel’s fastest supercomputing chip, the Xeon Phi 7290F, which is priced at $6,401. It is also over four times more expensive than the costliest PC chip, the $1,723 Core i7-6950X for gaming desktops.
Some price competition could come from AMD, which is reentering the server market with Zen-based chips in the second quarter. Its initial server chips code-named Naples have up to 32 cores. AMD has not revealed the target market for Naples, but it could be cloud providers.
During an earnings call, AMD indicated Naples chips would be competitively priced, and downplayed its margins expectations. AMD is projecting Zen chips to be high performance, but the company is looking for volume shipments and may not participate in the low-volume market of servers with more than eight sockets.
The Xeon E7-8894 v4, which is based on the Broadwell architecture, is priced high for many reasons.
