Wait wait wait. If it's preproduction hardware then the prices in the article are meaningless because you can't buy it. If it's unfair to compare performance metrics on preproduction hardware than surely it's equally unfair to compare prices (I mean, they may not even know the yields yet). You don't get to claim "Intel loses badly" and then hide behind "well, they can't have expected to have fixed everything yet!".
For comparison, those Xeon parts are Skylake-SP dies that first shipped 11 months ago. You can buy them on Amazon and rent them on AWS. They're a mature product in a well-established channel and their prices are stable and matched to the market.
The bottom line is that Cavium pulled out all the stops, shipped a board that works and performs... very adequately, with a few glitches. And frankly I don't know that glitchy acceptability is going to sell a whole lot of servers. So they slapped a price tag on it that draws eyeballs that the performance alone won't. If they can do that it's probably good news for them, but it's still a long road from here to revenue.
Yes, the prices on both sides are kind of meaningless, but one can make reasonable guesses about how they're likely to change. There is no plausible scenario in which Intel drops their prices far enough for this one to be close. They've never done anything like that before, even when it might have made sense. One can also make reasonable guesses about what kinds of flaws are likely to be fixed before the hardware goes into full production. Power management not kicking in when it should is a pretty obvious one. Yes, there's some guesswork, but there's a big difference between educated guesses vs. "Cavium's problems are carved in stone and Intel's prices are infinitely flexible" wishful thinking. Don't put all of your money into Intel stock.
> There is no plausible scenario in which Intel drops their prices far enough for this one to be close.
"No plausible scenario." Just put that one on a T shirt and come back in a year. The tech industry is littered with the graves of hardware products that got close to being great but ultimately didn't work out. And you're comparing it to a year-old mature product literally stocked at Amazon.
And unlike the literally dozens of semiconductor failures that littered the valley of the 1970's, they succeeded. This doesn't help your point.
I'm not saying Cavium cannot succeed, I'm saying delivering a chip to a reviewer that doesn't actually beat a Xeon probably isn't enough, no matter what price tag you invent.
Let me tip you off about something people with actual business experience know: if you don't get your stuff in front of reviewers, flawed as it may be, you fail. Hardware has long lead times. To get design wins, you have to sell on promise. Even some of Intel's own foundational products were objectively worse than contemporaries (e.g. even the IBM PC designers knew that the 68K was a better chip than the 8088) but got better over time. They got better because they had the wins due to selling on promise, and therefore have the funds. Any Intel competitor who waits until their product is better than Intel's on every metric, beyond any doubt, before they show anything to anyone, will run out of funding and quietly die.
As I said, one has to make educated guesses about what kinds of problems are likely to be fixed before full launch. Dogmatic statements based on experience limited to irrelevant domains aren't useful to anyone, and plain old pro-Intel FUD even less so.
For comparison, those Xeon parts are Skylake-SP dies that first shipped 11 months ago. You can buy them on Amazon and rent them on AWS. They're a mature product in a well-established channel and their prices are stable and matched to the market.
The bottom line is that Cavium pulled out all the stops, shipped a board that works and performs... very adequately, with a few glitches. And frankly I don't know that glitchy acceptability is going to sell a whole lot of servers. So they slapped a price tag on it that draws eyeballs that the performance alone won't. If they can do that it's probably good news for them, but it's still a long road from here to revenue.