Intel Announces New Xeon Names

Intel now refers to the Xeon line of processors for data centers as the Xeon Processor Scalable family. The E7 and E5 designation will also disappear: from the Skylake SP generation, the chips come out as Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

According to Intel, the new designation should indicate that a lot has changed with the Xeons; the company claims to have redesigned the successors to the E5 and E7 Xeons from the ground up. Intel hasn’t gone into much detail just yet. The official unveiling will follow in the summer. Currently, Intel is mainly providing an explanation of the naming, about which many details have already been published, including from Intel itself. For example, the name Skylake-SP was already known, but it is now clear that SP refers to Scalable Processors.

Intel has already announced that integrated options will be available for Omni-Path, network and accelerators. Optionally, Intel can therefore provide integration of Omni-Path, just like with the Xeon Phi, as AnandTech notes. Omni-Path is Intel’s Infiniband alternative. The interconnect offers a bandwidth of 100Gbit/s and latency of 100 to 110ns per port. In terms of network, Intel speaks of ethernet integration and as far as accelerators are concerned, it concerns, for example, avx-512.

The arrival of avx-512 to Skylake-SP is no surprise: Google has already announced that it will purchase these chips. It will also integrate hardware QuickAssist accelerators, which can help speed up applications such as encryption and compression. Intel calls other technologies complementary for Xeon Processor Scalable, such as FPGAs, optical interconnects with Silicon Photonics technology and Xeon Phi.

Intel lists that the Xeon family is divided into Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze, with Bronze being the entry-level segment with few cores and Silver should distinguish itself with economy. Some details have already appeared about Platinum and Gold: there will be fourteen Platinum and twenty Gold processors, of which the most powerful models have 28 cores.