Intel has finally unveiled their next generation of Ice Lake Xeon processors at Hot Chips 2020. The 3rd gen of Ice Lake-SP Xeon processors will come with various new features including a brand-new chip architecture, improved I/O, and an enhanced software stack powering Intel’s first 10nm server lineup.
The new Xeon processors officially named as Intel Ice-Lake-SP are scheduled to release at the end of the year, and will be on the Whitley platform. The processors have shown a big 18% IPC improvement, and the platform will also feature single and dual-socket servers.
At Hot Chips 2020, Intel revealed a 28 core Ice-Lake-SP processor to showcase the leaps they made from the last generation of Xeon Cascade Lake-SP processors which were based on the 14nm architecture.
The 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon processors will feature the 10nm+ process and will use Sunny cove cores, which improves front-end capacity, larger L2 cache and enhancements in TLBs, single-thread execution and prefetching. Scheduler entries have also been increased from 97 to 160.
Intel has also improved instruction sets, adding support for a host of new instructions to boost cryptography performance, like VPMADD52, GFNI, SHA-NI, Vector AES, and Vector Carry-Less multiply instructions, and a few new instructions to boost compression/decompression performance. Enhancement in algorithmic support allows Intel to gain almost 9x performance per core than Cascade lake.
The Ice Lake-SP processors will also support PCIe Gen 4. The platform will be able to support up to DDR4-3200 MHz memory, with range latency and coherence optimizations. The eight DDR4 memory channels will be split into four dual-channel controllers, which will improve performance.
Intel did not confirm if the 28-core chip was the highest core count chip coming out in this release. Earlier rumors did suggest that there will be higher core count chips than 28, but we will have to wait for more information to see what Intel has in stores. This lineup will be directly competing with AMD’s EPYC processors. We will have to wait and see what Intel has in store for the server-side platforms.
