“As we grow the core counts, do people really need to have a four socket system or an eight socket system? And I think the answer very simply is yes, we continue to see a strong demand for people who want to scale out their memory capacity,” said Ronak Singhal, senior fellow and chief architect, Xeon Products on a conference briefing with journalists.
As you scale out memory capacity, you need to pair the amount of compute that can scale out with it at the same time, he said. Otherwise, you just have a lot of unused memory because there’s no CPUs to me take advantage of it. And the biggest use case for these kinds of systems tends to be workloads like in memory databases, where it’s mission critical, enterprise software that can take advantage of the capabilities around the extra memory capacity that four socket or eight socket provides, he added.
Intel is stopping at eight sockets, but Singhal said third-party designers can create controllers for 16 and even 32 socket systems.
The other piece of the puzzle is Xeon 6 for network and edge, a system-on-chip (SoC) designed for high performance and power efficiency, with built-in accelerators for virtualized radio access networks (vRAN), media, AI and network security. Intel says the Xeon 6 SoCs deliver up to 2.4x the RAN capacity and a 70% improvement in performance-per-watt compared to previous generations of Xeons.
Additionally, Intel said the Xeon 6 is the industry’s first server SoC with a built-in media accelerator, the Intel Media Transcode Accelerator, enabling up to 14 times performance per watt gain versus Intel Xeon 6538N. AI RAN performance per core is improved by up to 3.2 times compared with the previous generation with vRAN Boost.
Intel also unveiled two new Ethernet controller and network adapter product lines to address the growing demands of enterprise, telecommunications, cloud, high performance computing (HPC), edge and AI applications.
