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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday April 06 2019, @10:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-to-the-core-of-things dept.

Intel has announced a number of new products, including a new "Cascade Lake" Xeon CPU with 56 cores instead of 48, and persistent memory 3D XPoint ("Optane") modules:

While these new CPUs do not use a new microarchitecture compared to the first generation Skylake-based Xeon Scalable processors, Intel surprised most of the press at its Tech Day with the sheer number of improvements in other areas of Cascade Lake. Not only are there more hardware mitigations against Spectre and Meltdown than we expected, but we have Optane DC Persistent Memory support. The high-volume processors get a performance boost by having up to 25% extra cores, and every processor gets double the memory support (and faster memory, too). Using the latest manufacturing technologies allows for frequency improvements, which when combined with new AVX-512 modes shows some drastic increases in machine learning performance for those that can use them.

New to the Xeon Scalable family is the AP line of processors. Intel gave a hint to these late last year, but we finally got some of the details. These new Xeon Platinum 9200 family of parts combine two 28-core bits of silicon into a single package, offering up to 56 cores and 112 threads with 12 channels of memory, in a thermal envelope up to 400W. This is essentially a 2P configuration on a single chip, and is designed for high-density deployments. These BGA-only CPUs will only be sold with an underlying Intel-designed platform straight from OEMs, and will not have a direct price – customers will pay for 'the solution', rather than the product.

[...] Broadly speaking, Intel has two different types of Optane: Optane Storage, and Optane DIMMs. The storage products have already been in the market for some time, both in consumer and enterprise, showing exceptional random access latency above and beyond anything NAND can provide, albeit for a price. For users that can amortize the cost, it makes for a great product for that market.

Optane in the memory module form factor actually works on the DDR4-T standard. The product is focused for the Enterprise market, and while Intel has talked about 'Optane DIMMs' for a while, today is the 'official launch'. Select customers are already testing and using it, while general availability is due in the next couple of months.

Optane DC Persistent Memory, to give it its official title, comes in a DDR4 form factor and works with Cascade Lake processors to enable large amounts of memory in a single system – up to 6TB in a dual socket platform. The Optane DCPMM is slightly slower than traditional DRAM, but allows for a much higher memory density per socket. Intel is set to offer three different sized modules, either 128 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB. Optane doesn't replace DDR4 entirely – you need at least one module of standard DDR4 in the system to get it to work (it acts like a buffer), but it means customers can pair 128GB DDR4 with 512 GB Optane for 768 GB total, rather than looking at a 256 GB of pure DDR4 backed with NVMe.

Also of note are new "10nm" Agilex FPGAs.

See also: The Intel Second Generation Xeon Scalable: Cascade Lake, Now with Up To 56-Cores and Optane!
Intel Announces New Optane And QLC Enterprise SSDs


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:30AM (#825584)

    They've fixed the issues that only Intel was vulnerable to

    Do you have a citation that Meltdown has now been fixed in all new Intel chips?

    If your statement is accurate, their latest released chips now available for sale may still be vulnerable to Meltdown... i.e. the chips currently being sold by Intel do not include the latest fixes, and given the time-to-market any hardware containing those fixes may not be available on the order of months to years.