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Intel announces new Xeon Processor Scalable Family, unifying its current Xeon E7 and E5 series

By Wong Chung Wee - on 4 May 2017, 6:45pm

Intel announces new Xeon Processor Scalable Family, unifying its current Xeon E7 and E5 series

(Image source: Intel)

Intel has lifted the veil from its new Xeon Processor Scalable Family that will unify its current Xeon E7 and E5 series. The company states the new Intel Xeon processors have been “re-designed from ground up”, in order to tackle the new challenges of future data centers’ computing and network requirements. This next generation of Skylake-based Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family (codenamed Skylake-SP for "scalable processor") will unify its current Broadwell-based Xeon E7 and Xeon E5 processors (which currently have codenames punctuated with E/EP/EX markers to denote single, dual and more than quad-processor scaling support). The new Xeon chips will be categorized into four series; the Intel Xeon Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze processors.

The Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family will offer four levels of performance and capabilities, with a wealth of configuration choice with regard to which integrations and accelerators customers need, and a new tiered model based on metals (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) to make the options simple and efficient to choose.

No particular models or numbering schemes have been unveiled yet, but the move to simplify the Xeon processor classes was to better offer more processor feature permutations than was previoulsy possible in the fixed set of E/EP/EX classes. For example, an EX-class chip that's made for high processor count within the platform would naturally have a lot of cache on-chip. Some vendors might like to have that attribute for their workloads, but perhaps only on a single-chip or dual-chip platform as they don't necessarily need a full fledged multi-processor solution. You can find more inputs on this aspect from interviews conducted on Anandtech.

According to Intel, the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family supports Intel AVX 512-bit instruction set as well as Intel QuickAssist technologies. But what would interest most customers is its “Intel Volume Management Device (Intel VMD), a new platform capability designed to deliver seamless management of PCIe-based (NVMe) solid state drives such as the recently-launched Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X and Intel SSD DC P4600 drives.”

Besides focusing on hardware deliverables, Intel has been working with developers in their Build ecosystem to deliver software solutions that will leverage on the hardware improvements of the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family. Do watch this space for more details!

(Source: Intel)

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