Not sure if I am imagining things or not. It seems as if processors and memory is up against a hard barrior and is waiting for a HUGE breakthrough. You can see this by the way my hardware hasn't really tanked in value. Hell, some things went up in value.
Well, the thing that needs to happen is the decimation of the 32GB UDIMM barrier that the E3's have suffered under for some years now. This is relevant both to ZFS (where memory is ARC is performance) and ESXi, where more faster cores mean you need more RAM for your VM's.
The problem is that Intel views E3 as an entry level platform, which it is, and they have to be really careful not to kill the golden goose, which is the big dollars that people usually pay for E5. But even in E5, the interesting thing is that the single-socket version of the E5 isn't horribly expensive. The E5-1620v3 (3.5GHz, 4 cores, 10MB) is only around $290, which is only thirty bucks more than the E3-1241v3, which has very similar specs. However, the E5-1650v3, which adds two more (50% more) cores, is 100% more expensive, at $580.
So Intel has, up until now, banked on cores, not memory, being the thing that they can really charge primo rates for. The jump from E3 to E5 on a similarly specced processor is only a modest price bump. But E3 doesn't offer more than 4 cores, and in E5, the pricing for cores isn't linear.
As a matter of fact, once you jump over to E5-2600, the price basically triples. The
E5-2643v3 is a very similar processor to the
E5-1650v3, except that it has a little more cache and it is designed for dual socket deployments, meaning that it is actually half of a 12 core server. The CPU is priced at over $1500, which is triple the 1650v3.
So, anyways, that's pricing irrationality in the Xeon market. Obviously Intel is making good cash off of cache, ha, ha, ha, ha.
From a marketing perspective, the E3 strategy is a little bit old at this point, but still really seems to fit the market pretty well. There's definitely a lot of applications for a 32GB-limited E3. So the introduction of the Xeon D with 128GB was interesting. It may eat some of the E3, but then again it is looking like the Xeon D is going to be rather more pricey. There's an argument to be made that Intel historically priced the E3 too low.
And of course then there's all the Broadwell stuff which is mostly useless for us over here in NASland.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9339/xeon-e31200-v4-launch-only-with-gpu-integrated
