Intel launched its new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors on Wednesday. This new platform is based upon Intel’s Ice Lake architecture and 10nm fabrication process. The new chips can hold up to 40 cores each and deliver some impressive performance gains. So far tests showed that the newer series leads with an average performance improvement of 46% against the older Cascade Lake Xeon Platinum in data workload benchmarks.
Other than a raw performance gain the Intel SGX this platform features Intel Crypto Acceleration and Intel DL Boost AI acceleration.
The latest Intel DL Boost delivers 74% faster AI performance compared to the prior generation and provides up to 1.5 times higher performance across most popular AI workloads versus AMD EPYC 7763 and up to 1.3 vs. Nvidia A100 GPU.
The 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable series supports system memory up to 6 TB per socket, up to 8 channels of DDR4 3200Mhz memory per socket, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 per socket.
Intel SGX security on the new 2-socket Xeon Scalable processors has enclaves that isolate and process up to 1 terabyte of code and data and meets the demands of most realistic workloads. With Intel® Total Memory Encryption and Intel® Platform Firmware Resilience, the Xeon Scalable series can help secure your sensitive data.
Intel Crypto Acceleration helps to achieve impressive performance in most of the important cryptographic algorithms out there. This can help with encryption-intensive workloads, such as online retailers who process millions of customer transactions per day, can leverage this capability to protect customer data without impacting user response times or overall system performance.
Software developers can use oneAPI to optimize their applications. It is open, cross-architecture programming. This brings better working environment than proprietary models. Intel’s new oneAPI Toolkits will let a user realize the processors’ performance, AI and encryption capabilities through advanced compilers, libraries, and other necessary tools for debugging and analytics.
The Ice Lake Xeon processors have 4189 pins, and they work on LGA4189-4 socket found in Intel’s Whitley Server Platform.
The Intel Xeon Scalable platform includes the Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series, Intel Optane Solid State Drive (SSD) P5800X, and Intel® SSD D5-P5316 NAND SSDs, as well as Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters and the latest Intel® Agilex FPGAs.
The Intel Xeon Scalable series has been optimized for a wide array of most demanding cloud workloads and service environments. Over 800 of the world’s cloud service providers are powered by the Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The largest of the cloud service providers are using 3rd gen Xeon Scalable series to enable their upcoming cloud services.
Intel’s network-optimized “N-SKUs” is designed to support diverse network environments and optimized for multiple workloads and performance levels. Therefore on average, the CPUs show 62% more performance than the prior generation. This was tested on a range of broadly deployed networks and 5G workloads.
3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors also help with complex image or video analytics, and consolidated workloads for an AI. As a result the Ice Lake chips bring up to 56% more AI inference performance for image classification than the prior generations.
