Intel has expanded its Xeon 6 line of processors, adding models 6700/6500 for high-performance cores and edge computing devices to the family.
The new Xeon 6 processors feature Performance-cores (P-cores) for high performance computing. The Xeon 6 uses two types of cores, P-core for maximum performance and the lower power drawing Efficiency core (E-core). Intel launched with the E-core last summer followed by P-core in the fall.
The new Xeons are P-core based but offer slightly less in performance than the 6900P launched last September. The Xeon 6700/6500 series of processors with P-cores are designed for modern data centers, offering a balance between performance and energy efficiency.
Intel claims a 1.4 times better performance than the previous generation across a wide range of enterprise workloads, including acting as a host node CPU for AI systems. Intel claims that Xeon 6 offers up to 1.5 times better performance than the 5th generation AMD Epyc processor.
The difference between 6700 and 6500 is different levels of performance and core count. The 6700 has 8 to 86 cores, where the parts with fewer cores have greater clock speeds, while the 6500 family has 12 to 32 cores, also of varying clock speeds based on how many cores it has. Both have 8 channels of DDR5 memory, a step down from the 12 channels found in the 6900.
One area that the 6500/6700 has over the 6900 is sockets. The 6900 comes in a single or dual socket design, while the 6500/6700 can support up to eight sockets on one motherboard.
“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.
The Intel Ethernet E830 Controllers and Network Adapters deliver up to 200GbE bandwidth and are optimized for high-density virtualized workloads, with advanced security features and performance. The Intel Ethernet E610 Controllers and Network Adapters provide 10GBASE-T connectivity optimized for control plane operations.
Source:: Network World