With the introduction of its 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), Intel Xeon CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM), and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio), Intel is giving its clients a boost in data center performance, efficiency, security, and new capabilities for AI, the cloud, the network, and edge.
Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon processors would provide clients with a variety of capabilities for controlling power and performance, making the most use of CPU resources to aid in their sustainability objectives. These would represent Intel’s most environmentally friendly data center CPUs thus far.
“The launch of 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors and the Max Series product family is a pivotal moment in fueling Intel’s turnaround, reigniting our path to leadership in the data center and growing our footprint in new arenas,” said Sandra Rivera, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center and AI Group at Intel. “Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon and the Max Series product family deliver what customers truly want – leadership performance and reliability within a secure environment for their real-world requirements – driving faster time to value and powering their pace of innovation.”
The 4th Gen Xeon series would significantly improve on Intel’s workload-first strategy and approach with its purpose-built design.
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Dedicated Servers and Intel Xeon
According to Intel, over 100 million Xeons have been installed in the market, powering everything from on-premises servers that run IT services, such as new as-a-service business models, to networking hardware that controls Internet traffic, wireless base station computing at the edge, cloud services, and other devices.
Intel Xeon processors are widely used in dedicated server solutions around the world. They are based on the x86 instruction set, which is the most common instruction set used in servers. One of the main advantages of Intel Xeon processors is their ability to handle multiple cores and threads, which allows for efficient multitasking and parallel processing.
Many Intel Xeon processors include Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, which improves performance by allowing each core to handle multiple threads simultaneously. Xeon processors also offer large amounts of memory and storage capacity, allowing them to handle large workloads and data sets. Because of their capabilities in handling large workloads, and also the ability to handle high computational load, Xeon processors can be ideal for use in dedicated servers for enterprise-level tasks including web hosting, database management, and high-performance computing.
Processor: Performance, Sustainability, AI
When using built-in accelerators, 4th Gen Intel Xeon clients, according to Intel, can anticipate an increase in performance per watt efficiency of 2.9x for targeted workloads, up to 70 watts of power savings per CPU in optimized power mode with little performance loss, and a 52% to 66% lower TCO when compared to previous generations.
The breadth of integrated accelerators found in the 4th Generation Xeon means Intel offers platform-level power savings, reducing the need for extra discrete acceleration and assisting clients in achieving their environmental objectives. Additionally, for specific workloads, the new Optimized Power Mode can provide up to 20 percent socket power savings with less than 5 percent performance effect, stated Intel. The overall energy used by data centers is being further reduced by new developments in air and liquid cooling, while the 4th Gen Xeon was constructed using 90 percent or more renewable power at Intel sites with cutting-edge water reclamation facilities.
With integrated Intel Advanced Matrix Extension (Intel AMX) accelerators, 4th Gen Xeon processors in AI would deliver up to 10x faster PyTorch real-time inference and training performance compared to previous generation. New levels of performance for inference and training across a broad range of AI tasks are unlocked by Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon. With up to a 20x speedup on big language models, the Xeon CPU Max Series would extend on these strengths for natural language processing.
Developers may utilize their preferred AI tool while working more productively and developing AI faster thanks to Intel’s AI software package. The suite can scale out in the cloud and all the way out to the edge because it is portable from the desktop. More than 400 machine learning and deep learning AI models across the most popular AI use cases in every business sector have verified it.
Networking, HPC
A series of processors designed for high-performance, low-latency network and edge applications is available with 4th Gen Xeon. These processors are an essential component of the infrastructure enabling a future that is increasingly software-defined across a range of sectors, from manufacturing and smart cities to telecommunications and retail. Built-in accelerators aid in increasing throughput and reducing latency for 5G core applications, while improvements in power management improve the platform’s responsiveness and economy.
Additionally, the 4th Gen Xeon would provide up to double the virtualized radio access network (vRAN) capacity without increasing power consumption as compared to earlier generations. In order to satisfy their essential performance, scalability, and energy efficiency objectives, communications service providers are now able to double the performance-per-watt.
For the most demanding computational tasks in HPC and AI, the Intel Max Series product family and the 4th Gen Xeon processor would deliver a scalable, balanced architecture that combines CPU and GPU with oneAPI’s open software ecosystem.
The Xeon CPU Max Series is an x86-based processor with high bandwidth memory, enabling it to accelerate several HPC tasks without requiring code modifications. The highest-density Intel CPU, the Data Center GPU Max Series, will be offered in a variety of form factors to suit various client requirements.
High bandwidth memory (HBM2e) of 64 gigabytes is available on the Xeon CPU Max Series package, greatly enhancing data throughput for HPC and AI applications. The Xeon CPU Max Series would offer up to 3.7 times better performance on a variety of real-world applications including energy and earth system modeling when compared to the most advanced 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs.
Furthermore, the Data Center GPU Max Series would increase throughput for demanding tasks like physics, financial services, and life sciences by packing over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile device. When running the LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator, the combined platform, when combined with the Xeon CPU Max Series, would achieve up to 12.8 times better performance than the preceding generation.
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Feature-Rich, Security
With up to four Intel 7-built tiles combined on a single package and connected using Intel EMIB (embedded multi-die interconnect bridge) packaging technology, the 4th Gen Xeon would represent the biggest platform transformation that Intel has ever delivered. It also boasts new features like increased memory bandwidth with DDR5, increased I/O bandwidth with PCIe5.0, and Compute Express Link (CXL) 1.1 interconnect.
Security is the cornerstone of it all. Data security, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty are all improved by Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon, which would offer one of the most comprehensive confidential computing portfolios of any data center silicon vendor in the market. With Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), which offers low attack surface for confidential computing in private, public, and cloud-to-edge contexts, Intel may enable application isolation for data center computing. Additionally, Intel’s new virtual machine (VM) isolation technology, Intel Trust Domain Extensions (Intel TDX), which will premiere with Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, can be great for converting current workloads into a secure environment.
Finally, thanks to the 4th Gen Xeon’s modular architecture, Intel would be able to provide a wide selection of processors across almost 50 targeted SKUs for customer use cases or applications, ranging from general-purpose SKUs to ones specifically designed for use in the cloud, databases, analytics, networking, storage, and single-socket edge use cases. The 4th Gen Xeon processor series is On Demand-capable and comes in a variety of core counts, frequencies, combinations of accelerators, power envelopes, and memory throughputs depending on the form factors and intended use cases being addressed by the processors.
More information on these new Intel Xeon processors can be found here.
