Re: For procurement...
"What performance premium do Intel chips provide, when they have to be patched for Meltdown, and AMD chips do not?"
At the very high end (which is where we're looking here, in cloud DCs), Intel chips have a roughly 25% higher benchmark than AMD. So even with a 6-10% slowdown from the Meltdown patches, you're better on Intel chips. The only workloads where this may not apply is heavy database usage (SQL clusters etc); the very high (upto 40%) impact of meltdown mitigation on these specific use-cases means the top AMD chip performance may squeak ahead on these server types.
Mid-to-low end, the difference in baseline performance is less - but the use-case for servers using these chips will tend to be less impacted by meltdown mitigation too, so Intel likely remains ahead.
AMD will generally give better performance-per-dollar at most levels, but the metrics show absolute performance on both single and multi-core remains an Intel strength. Epyc and Ryzen are very good processor lines, far better than the dross AMD have been releasing for the last decade or so, but they're not really a match for Xeon and the i-7 at the high end of the market yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
