Intel Presents a Refreshed Xeon CPU Roadmap for 2023-2025

[T0@st]

All eyes - especially investors' eyes - are on Intel's data center business today. Intel's Sandra Rivera, Greg Lavender and Lisa Spelman hosted a webinar focused on the company's Data Center and Artificial Intelligence business unit. They offered a big update on Intel's latest market forecasts, hardware plans and the way Intel is empowering developers with software.

Executives dished out updates on Intel's data center business for investors. This included disclosures about future generations of Intel Xeon chips, progress updates on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) and demos of Intel hardware tackling the competition, heavy AI workloads and more.

Xeon Roadmap Roll Call
Among Sapphire Rapids, Emerald Rapids, Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, there is a lot going on in the server CPU business. Here's your Xeon roadmap updates in order of appearance:



Today: A 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) update
All major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) are shipping 4th Gen Xeon systems, and the top 10 global cloud service providers are working on deploying services on 4th Gen Xeon. It's the highest quality data center CPU Intel has ever delivered, and the ramp is continuing aggressively. Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon Products, offered up a demo of a 48-core 4th Gen Xeon going head-to-head with a 48-core 4th Gen AMD Epyc CPU. The result? Intel's 4th Gen Xeon with Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX) delivers an average performance gain of 4 times the competition's latest tech on a broad set of deep-learning workloads.



Q4 2023: 5th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable (code-named Emerald Rapids)
Emerald Rapids is Intel's next Performance-core (P-core) product. Starting today, it is officially known as 5th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable. As it sheds its code name and dons formal branding in preparation for its launch, the CPU is already sampling to customers. Volume validation is underway and Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group, told investors that factory silicon quality is very high.



First-half 2024: Sierra Forest
Sierra Forest, the first Efficiency-core (E-core) processor, is on track for the first half of 2024. Today, Intel announced that Sierra Forest will boast 144 cores per socket. The first CPU based on the upcoming Intel 3 process, Sierra Forest hit power-on earlier this quarter with multiple OSes booting in record time (less than a day). It's on schedule with the first samples already out the door. A Sierra Forest demonstration during today's presentation included a nice shot of task manager showing all 144 cores chugging along processing the demo workload.



A Fast Follow: Granite Rapids
Granite Rapids will arrive hot on the heels of Sierra Forest in 2024. Though a specific launch date has yet to be disclosed, its time-to-market will benefit from sharing a platform with Sierra Forest. Shared IP and technology minimize development and design time. Granite Rapids is hitting all major milestones and the first stepping is out of the factory and healthy. It's also sampling to customers with positive feedback. Spelman hosted a first taste of Granite Rapids innovation during a demo.



"We are building the fastest memory interface in the world for Granite Rapids," Spelman said as she fired up a command prompt to show off its memory configuration. "Intel invented and led the ecosystem in developing a new type of DIMM called Multiplexer Combined Rank (MCR) that lets us achieve speeds of 8,800 mega transfers per second, based on DDR5."

The MCR DIMM innovation achieves an 80% peak bandwidth increase over current-gen server memory technology, and Lisa was able to demonstrate Granite Rapids' stability while saturating a healthy memory subsystem with read/writes.

Further into the Future
Speaking to it publicly for the first time, Intel will continue to execute on its E-core roadmap with the follow-on to Sierra Forest: Clearwater Forest. Coming to market in 2025, Clearwater Forest will be manufactured on Intel 18A, the node where Intel plans to achieve process leadership - it's the culmination of the company's five-nodes-in-four-years strategy.



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[phanbuey]

Is it quarterly Intel roadmap time already? Time is flying these days.

 

[Wirko]

That MCR is going to be a big thing. That's if Intel executes as it promises, if memory makers pick it up, etc. But the multiplexers, just like those for PCIe, will be costly enough to remain a server-exclusive tech.

 

[londiste]

Intel 3 in shipping Xeons 24H1?

 

[Minus Infinity]

Fun fact: The path to hell is paved with Intel roadmaps.

cough BS cough on the time frames.

 

[Steevo]

Intel and death by PowerPoint. Here are some slides, they say we are doing good and going to do better and would a slide my job depends on that I made lie to you?

Look at that line, it’s almost like the line will go straight up forever…. We just cut off the portion where it turns back over on itself and crashed in the baseline killing billions in profits….

 

[Wirko]

Intel and death by PowerPoint. Here are some slides, they say we are doing good and going to do better and would a slide my job depends on that I made lie to you?

Look at that line, it’s almost like the line will go straight up forever…. We just cut off the portion where it turns back over on itself and crashed in the baseline killing billions in profits….

You missed the opportunity to call it death by a thousand slides.