Items tagged with Xeon
When Pat Gelsinger stepped into the role of CEO of Intel, replacing Bob Swan at the helm, he outlined a plan to restore Intel's leadership in its fab process technologies. He also made clear that Intel would tap third-party foundries, where it makes sense to do that, and it appears as though Intel will be a major customer of TSMC's 3-nanometer node. It was reported earlier this year that TSMC anticipates mass producing 3nm wafers next year, which will pack 1.7 times the density of its 5nm node. At the time, it was expected Apple would be a major customer of 3nm silicon, for custom chips used in its various product lines as it continues to transition away from Intel's x86 silicon. Then last month,...
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Apple is eager to leave Intel behind as the supplier of CPUs for its Mac lineup, but bear in mind that this transition to using Arm-based silicon based on custom home brewed designs in place of Intel's x86 CPUs is not an overnight thing—Apple last year said it would take a couple of years to complete the transition. As such, rumors of a next-gen Mac Pro powered by another Xeon processor are at least plausible. Let's take a step back for a moment. Apple's pending wholesale switch to custom Arm designs is a seismic shift of sorts. The partnership between Apple and Intel dates back to 2006, when the former moved away from PowerPC hardware to the latter's x86 Core processors. But going forward,...
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Intel talked a little bit about Sapphire Rapids, its next generation Xeon Scalable processor lineup, during its Architecture Day 2020 event last August. While it has always been assumed Sapphire Rapids will leverage Intel's upcoming Golden Cove architecture, just like Alder Lake, this has never been officially confirmed. Until now, that is. It might be more of an inadvertent confirmation, or one that Intel was not necessarily ready to make public. Either way, a Linux engineer at Intel spilled the beans in a recent patch. In the patch notes, Intel's Andi Kleen clarifies an association with Sappire Rapids-X, which was previously labeled as being based on the Willow Cove architecture. "Sapphire...
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Normally when people think of "business-class laptops" they envision moderately powerful systems that handle office productivity tasks and web browsing duties with plenty of performance to keep employees productive, but without frivolous cost-adding features. On the flip side, workstations conjure images of tremendously powerful beasts with all the right kinds of excess: plenty of cores, tons of memory, and high-end professional graphics with certified drivers for powerful, mission-critical applications. Somewhere in the middle is the mobile workstation market, where hybrid laptops like the HP ZBook Fury 15 G7 we'll be showing you here today, try to straddle the line between the two extremes...
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Past leaks have suggested that Intel's upcoming 4th Gen Xeon Scalable server processors codenamed Sapphire Rapids will flex up to 56 cores and 112 threads of big iron, but maybe an even bigger flex is in store. A user who got their hands on a supposed Sapphire Rapids engineering sample did onlookers a solid by peeling away the integrated heatspreader, to reveal some interesting details. We have seen Sappire Rapids in the wild before, assuming the leaked photos that popped up in February were not fake. They showed the top and bottom of an engineering sample. That leak also came with an accompanying pin diagram, which depicted a new LGA4577-X socket. The additional pins over LGA4189 enable some...
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When we think of processors used in the enterprise market, Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC x86-64 families typically comes to mind. Intel has the lion's share of the market, with AMD steadily gaining traction ever since its Zen architecture birthed first-generation EPYC 7001 processors. However, Arm is also a player in this space with its Neoverse CPU architecture, which first debuted in 2019. Neoverse N2: Cloud-to-Edge Performance Greatness Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployed its and Graviton2 processor, while Ampere has made waves with its Altra; both processors are based on Arm's Neoverse N1 architecture. Today, Arm is ready to take the next giant leap in performance with the launch of Neoverse N2....
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Earlier this week, Intel formally introduced the world to its 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, its first server chips built on a 10-nanometer manufacturing process. Otherwise known as Ice Lake-SP, these are being offered in up to 40-core/80-thread configurations, up from 28-core/56-thread configs with its 2nd gen products. Looking ahead, however, rumor has it Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors codenamed Sapphire Rapids will feature up to 56 cores and 112 threads, along with some additional goodies. Sapphire Rapids is not a complete secret. In fact, Intel talked a little bit about Sapphire Rapids during its Architecture Day 2020 event, noting that its upcoming Xeon processors are based...
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Intel is launching its first server products built using its advanced 10nm manufacturing process today: the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. For example, core counts have been significantly increased; Intel 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature up to 40 cores per processor versus 28 cores with 2nd gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total system memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher...
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Intel has a couple of notable events coming up. The first is a webcast scheduled for tomorrow (March 23), in which Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will discuss a "new era of innovation and technology leadership." Then in a couple weeks from now, Intel is planning to formally introduce its latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors based on Ice Lake-SP. Intel's Xeon launch event, titled "How Wonderful Gets Done 2021," is scheduled for April 6 at 8:00 am Pacific (11:00 am Eastern). Intel's Navin Shenoy, executive vice president in the Data Platforms Group, and Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president in the Xeon and Memory Group, will both be on hand to discuss the new processor launches. Gelsinger and...
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The server wars are heating up, with both AMD and Intel prepping new weaponry for the lucrative battlefield. According to Intel, its 3rd Gen Xeon "Ice Lake-SP" Xeon Platinum processors bring the boom and include "revolutionary new technologies." While we wait for a proper launch, two upcoming Ice Lake-SP chips have poked their heads into a benchmark database. The two listings appear over at SiSoftware's SANDRA database, one of which contains some bench results for a pair of Xeon Platinum 8352Y server processors, and the other for a single Xeon Platinum 8352S processor. In terms of each one's specifications, they are pretty much identical, except the Y variant supports dual-socket configs and...
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It has been interesting to see AMD and duke it out on the home desktop, the former with its latest generation Zen 3 architecture and the latter with Comet Lake (soon to be Rocket Lake). But that is not the only place these two chip giants tussle. The server space is an important battleground, and both are set to load up new artillery, models and specs of which have seemingly leaked out. Leaked information on upcoming server CPUs has been an ongoing thing, actually, some of which we have covered. Back in December, for example, a pair of next-gen EPYC 7003 series CPUs with 64-cores and 128-threads ripped through Cinebench 23, scoring an insane 87,878 in the multi-core test and 1,215 in the single-core...
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Intel is not real happy with one of its former employees, Dr. Varun Gupta, who spent nearly a decade at the chip maker as its product marketing engineer before leaving in January of last year. In a recently filed lawsuit, Intel alleges Dr. Gupta stole "highly confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information" before his "voluntary resignation and departure from Intel," and attempted to use that information to negotiate more favorable terms for Xeon hardware in his new position at Microsoft. Following his departure from Intel, Dr. Gupta landed a gig at Microsoft, where he currently serves as a principal for strategic planning in the company's cloud and artificial intelligence department....
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Back at Intel's Architecture Day 2020 event, the chip maker divulged certain details about its 10-nanometer SuperFin technology, and talked a little about its next-generation Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. It seems Intel is on track to Sapphire Rapids later this year, as evidenced by photos of what are purportedly actual engineering samples. Sapphire Rapids is based on Intel's enhanced SuperFin technology, which presumably offers better performance and power characteristics compared to the current generation Xeon Scalable lineup. Intel's upcoming 4th Gen Xeon chips will also bring new technologies into the fold, including DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0 support, Compute Express...
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Most people would probably agree that Intel is in need of a win in the CPU sector, now that AMD's Ryzen 5000 series is kicking tail and taking names (for those who can find one in stock, anyway). Ice Lake might provide that win, in the server space. How so? According to Intel, a 32-core Xeon processor based on Ice Lake can outperform a 64-core EPYC "Rome" processor in certain benchmarks. There is a bit to unpack there, so let's get started. In present form, Ice Lake is what underpins Intel's 10th generation Core processors laptops, with Sunny Cove underneath the hood. It is based on a 10-nanometer manufacturing process, and more recently has been supplanted by Tiger Lake in the mobile space,...
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When it comes to high-speed interfaces for storage and graphics, PCIe 4.0 has been a known quantity (at least for consumers) since AMD launched its Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 platform during the summer of 2019. Intel embraced PCIe 4.0 this year with the release of Tiger Lake, although laptop manufacturers have yet to leverage the higher data transfer rates available with PCIe 4.0 SSDs. To that end, Intel is already looking towards PCIe 5.0, and this week announced that it has worked with Synopsys to demonstrate operability with its next-generation Xeon Scalable processors, aka Sapphire Rapids. For the demonstration, Intel made use of the Synopsys DesignWare controller and physical interface (PHY)....
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We’ve known that Ice Lake-SP processors would be on the way from Intel for quite some time, and we’re now getting a glimpse at some high-end SKUs that will be coming to the Xeon product family. Intel has been stuck on the 14nm process node for its mainstream and enterprise-class processors for much longer than originally anticipated, but Ice Lake-SP is the company’s first foray into 10nm for Xeons. Luckily, some leaked benchmarks have made their way to the Geekbench database that gives us an early look at what to expect when these chips land later this year (hopefully). Kicking things off with Geekbench, a dual-socket system was benchmarked with two 28-core Ice...
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The Intel Data Center Group (DCG) unveiled a plethora of new products today targeting AI and big data analytics workloads, including 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, 200 Series Optane Persistent Memory, AI-optimized Stratix 10 NX FPGAs, and faster 3D NAND-based solid state drives. Over the last few years, Intel has taken a multi-pronged approach to its data center products portfolio. In addition to advancing its processor platforms to improve compute performance and better accelerate new, emerging workloads, Intel has also focused on bringing data closer to the processor, and granting the processor (and accelerators) faster access to that data. Today’s announcements regarding new...
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As far as we know, Intel is still planning to launch 10th generation 10-nanometer Ice Lake-SP Xeon processors for the server market this year, and perhaps even sometime this month, if it sticks with a previously rumored 1H20 time frame. Ahead of the launch, we have another set of Ice Lake-SP leaks to digest. This latest round of leaks focuses on an Ice Lake-SP model with 24 cores and 48 threads. As we have written about before, Ice Lake-SP is rumored to ship with up to 38 cores and 72 threads (per socket), with support for 64 PCI Express 4.0 lanes. 8-channel DDR4-3200 memory (16 DIMMs per socket), and Intel's second generation Optane DC Persistent memory. These upcoming chips will be part of...
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So much of the attention on Intel's 2020 CPU lineup has been on the company's upcoming Comet Lake-S and Comet Lake-H desktop processors, and whatever 10-nanometer products might be in the pipeline. Lest we forget, though, Intel will be refreshing its Xeon server processors as well. As it pertains to that, some leaked slides potentially give us some insight into Intel's plans. Prominent leakers Momomo_US and Komachi are the sources of the latest leak, both of which highlighted upcoming Xeon parts. Starting with the latter, the Twitter user posted what looks like to be an official Intel slide outlining Intel's second generation "Barlow Pass" Optane DC persistent memory for the chip maker's Ice...
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We've been hearing quite a bit about Intel's Comet Lake-H family of mobile processors in recent months, but only with respect to the chips aimed at the consumer market. Today, however, information is coming down the pipeline regarding Comet Lake-H mobile chis that are part of the Xeon family. In this case, reliable leaker momomo_us has uncovered references to two Xeon processors: the Xeon W-10855M and the Xeon W-10885M. Given the cache configurations of the processors, it's expected that the former will be a 6-core/12-thread design, while the latter will employ 8 cores and 16 threads. Furthermore, the listing suggests that the Xeon W-10855M and Xeon W-10885M will have turbo clocks of...
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When it comes to its highly profitable Xeon Scalable server processors, Intel has been on the defensive as of late versus its chief rival AMD. While INTC has an overwhelmingly large lead in server processor market share, it also is looking to protect that lead with the release of its Cascade Lake Refresh processors. This is not a complete retooling of Intel's second-generation server processors, but rather some skillful optimization of features, speeds, feeds and pricing to make them more compelling for data center and enterprise customers. While Intel makes no comparisons to AMD’s EPYC 7002 processors in this release, the company does say that this new Cascade Lake Refresh offers up to...
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Intel is planning to roll out new Xeon processors this year, including ones built around its 10th generation Ice Lake architecture, which is already shipping in consumer laptops. Built on a 10-nanometer manufacturing process, the Ice Lake-SP Xeon lineup will go toe-to-toe with AMD's Zen 3-based EPYC "Milan" processors in the server space. A leaked benchmark of one of the upcoming CPUs indicates Intel has itself on solid footing. Well, maybe. Back in October of last year, a presentation slide from an ASUS IoT seminar highlighted some of what Intel has in store for the server sector. One of the takeaways is that Ice Lake-SP processors will be paired with Intel's Whitley chipset, and will use socket...
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