The battle for supremacy in the CPU space isn’t just limited to the mainstream desktop segment or the HEDT segment. There’s quite a lot of action even in the enterprise space and that’s evidenced by the recent launch of the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family. However, this year’s data centric portfolio refresh isn’t limited to just the processors. One major update is that of Optane DC Persistent Memory, which from what we’ve witnessed, is poised to change the data centre landscape tremendously. Finally, the final major update comes in the form of new AVX-512 extensions (VNNI) under the x86 ISA.
Cascade Lake, as this family is know internally, is based off the same Skylake microarchitecture. So core-to-core running at the same frequency, a 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processor will perform at the exact same level as long as the workloads do not make use of the newer features. That might sound like an absurd statement but aside from the newly introduced VNNI extensions, the two microarchitectures are the same. However, when you consider VNNI as well as the support for Optane DC Persistent Memory, you end up getting a massive boost in performance with workloads that can utilise VNNI. Essentially, with a few minor tweaks, Intel has managed to extract much higher performance from the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Processor family. However, that’s not the end of the road. This new generation of processors also includes hardware mitigations for the infamous Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities. When the fixes for these vulnerabilities were issued over the course of the past year, it was in the form of OS patches and CPU microcode updates. These have a negative hit on the CPU performance and as a result, one would expect performance to drop but Intel has managed to get more performance with these fixes incorporated.
This second generation of Xeon Scalable processors include 20 Platinum SKUs of which 4 are from the 9200 family while the remaining 16 are from the 8200 family. Then there are 21 Gold SKUs from the 6200 family and 10 Gold SKUs from the 5200 family. This is followed by 7 Silven 4200 SKUs and lastly, there’s one Bronze 3200 SKU. It stands to reason that Intel would have more SKUs in the most popular segment of the SKU table, which seems to be Gold. We did ask if Intel could give us numbers as to which segment sells the most but they didn’t give us a confirmation. The Platinum 8200 series also seems to be quite popular but the best SKUs of this generation lie in the Platinum 9200 segment.
L = Large Memory Support (up to 4.5 TB)
M = Medium Memory Support (up to 2.0 TB)
N = Networking/NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) Specialised
S = Search Optimised
T = Long Life Cycle/Thermal
V = Virtual Machine Density Value Optimized
Y = Speed Select Models (see below)
You’ve no doubt heard of Optane, an Intel brand under which we’ve seen SSDs until now. On the client side, these have been primarily used for caching SSDs that help increase performance when used with mechanical Hard Drives. On the SSD front, Intel announced the Optane SSD DC D4800X which is an upgrade over the P4800X in the sense that it has dual ports to ensure higher availability should one of the ports malfunction. Intel has had dual port SSDs for a while such as the DC D3700 Series. The D at the beginning indicate dual port functionality. The Optane DC D4800X SSD will be available in the U.2 form factor.
While that was the usual SSD launch, the more important launch was that of the Optane DCPMM or DC Persistent Memory Modules. These are non-volatile memory modules which utilise the same form factor as DDR4 memory modules do and it acts as both, DRAM as well as a storage drive. Simply put, there are two modes – App Direct Mode and Memory Mode.
Then there is the App Direct Mode, which converts the Optane DCPMM into a non-volatile storage space. So if you have to reboot, the whole process of dumping data from your memory to your drive, rebooting, then transferring data back to the memory, is simplified and you end up saving a lot of time, thus helping with the uptime.
Intel mentioned that several vendors have already been using Optane memory for a few months now.