The Intel® Xeon® 4th Gen Scalable Processors is finally here!
After a few months of wait and speculation, Intel is launching its brand-new generation of the Xeon series processors. One thing for sure, the wait was worth it!
Intel plays an important role in enabling innovation and providing performance, stability, and security for organizations and developers. It also aims to provide power and flexibility to allow for future ideas and innovations.
What to expect from the new Xeon generation Sapphire Rapids?
Intel's Xeon CPU Max Series is a unique x86 processor that features high bandwidth memory, allowing it to improve performance in many high-performance computing workloads without requiring any changes to the code. Additionally, Intel is also releasing the Data Center GPU Max Series, which is the company's most powerful processor yet and will come in a variety of form factors to suit different customer needs.
The Xeon CPU Max Series provides 64 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory (HBM2e), which greatly improves data throughput for HPC and AI workloads. In comparison to the top-end 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Xeon CPU Max Series delivers up to 3.7 times more performance on various real-world applications, such as energy and earth systems modeling.
The launch of this new generation is particularly exciting due to the overall platform improvements, which include the integration of DDR5, PCIe Gen5, CXL, and 50% more cores per socket, in addition to the built-in accelerators. This represents a significant leap in platform capability and performance beyond just the CPUs.
Intel claims that 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable customers will experience an average of:
- 9 times more efficient performance per watt when using built-in accelerators,
- a 70-watt power savings per CPU in an optimized power mode with minimal performance loss,
- a 52 to 66% reduction in total cost of ownership and power consumption compared to previous generations.
Key Features
8 channel DDR5 and 16 DIMMs per socket
Up to 80 lanes PCIe 5.0/4.0
Up to 60 cores
Max turbo frequency up to 4.20 GHz
Sustainability
4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are Intel’s most sustainable data center processors, delivering a range of features for optimizing power and performance, making optimal use of CPU resources to help achieve customers’ sustainability goals.
The 4th Gen Xeon processors have built-in accelerators that provide platform-level power savings and help customers achieve sustainability goals. The new Optimized Power Mode can deliver up to 20% socket power savings while maintaining a less than 5% performance impact for selected workloads. Innovations in air and liquid cooling also reduce total data center energy consumption. Additionally, 4th Gen Xeon processors are manufactured with 90% or more renewable electricity at Intel sites that have state-of-the-art water reclamation facilities.
Applications
With the most built-in accelerators of any CPU in the world for key workloads such as AI, analytics, networking, security, storage, and high-performance computing (HPC), 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Max Series families deliver leadership performance in a purpose-built workload-first approach.
According to Intel, the 4th generation Xeon processors offer significant performance enhancements when compared to the previous generation. These improvements include a 53% increase in general computing, up to 10 times faster performance for AI inference and training, double the performance for networking, storage, and telecommunications, a 3x increase in data analytics processing, and a 3.7x enhancement for high-performance computing.
HPC
Accelerators integrated can improve the speed of data movement and compression for enhanced networking, enhance query performance for improved analytics, and manage loads across multiple cores through dynamic scheduling and queue management for better balance.
AI
The 4th Gen Xeon processors in Artificial Intelligence (AI) achieve up to 10x higher PyTorch real-time inference and training performance with built-in Intel Advanced Matrix Extension (AMX) accelerators.
They unlock new levels of performance for a wide range of AI workloads, and the Xeon CPU Max Series expands on these capabilities for natural language processing, with customers seeing up to a 20x speed-up on large language models.
Networking
The 4th Gen Xeon processors are optimized for high-performance, low-latency network and edge workloads, and are a key part of driving a more software-defined future for industries like telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, and smart cities.
For 5G core workloads, built-in accelerators increase throughput and decrease latency, while advances in power management enhance responsiveness and efficiency.
Data Analytics
Integrated accelerators can improve the performance of various types of applications such as in-memory databases, big data, data warehousing, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning.
The Intel DSA (Data Streaming Accelerator) boosts the efficiency of data movement and transformation operations, which are commonly used in data processing-intensive applications. Additionally, Intel IAA (Intelligent Acceleration Adapter) helps to reduce the workload on the CPU cores and increase the speed of database operations.
Encryption
The Intel QAT (QuickAssist Technology) is now integrated into the 4th generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, it accelerates the process of cryptography and compression.
It can greatly increase CPU efficiency, application performance, reduce the amount of data used, and decrease power consumption. This allows organizations to improve encryption without compromising on performance.