Intel's Cooper Lake Plans: The Chip That Wasn't Meant to Exist, Fades Away
Following an exclusive report from SemiAccurate, and confirmed by Intel through ServeTheHome, the news on the wire is that Intel is set to can wide-spread general availability to its Cooper Lake line of 14nm Xeon Scalable processors. The company is set to only make the hardware available for priority scale-out customers who have already designed quad-socket and eight-socket platforms around the hardware. This is a sizeable blow to Intel's enterprise plans, putting the weight of Intel's future x86 enterprise CPU business solely on the shoulders of its 10nm Ice Lake Xeon future, which has already seen significant multi-quarter delays from its initial release schedule.
[...] Today's news is that Intel is pulling the plug on Cooper Lake. That's despite being a product that was ES sampling as early as 18 months ago, potentially QS sampling 12 months ago, and should be out already. If you wanted a single socket or a dual socket Cooper Lake server, then bad luck – Intel is set to only sample Cooper Lake to key customers (Facebook) who are driving quad-socket and eight-socket systems.
As reported at ServeTheHome, Intel gave the following guideance. We've split it into several segments to discuss what is being said.
- Given the continued success of our recent expansion of 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable products, in addition to customer demand for our upcoming 10nm Ice Lake processors, we have decided to narrow the delivery of our Cooper Lake products that best meets our market demand.
- Intel's upcoming Cooper Lake processors will be supported on the Cedar Island platform, which supports standard and custom configurations that scale up to 8 sockets.
- Customers, including some of the largest AI innovators today, are uniquely interested in Cooper Lake's enhanced DL Boost technology including the industry's first inclusion of bfloat16 instruction processing support. We expect strong demand for the technology and processing capability with certain customer segments and AI usages in the marketplace that support deep learning for training and inference use cases.
- We continue to expect delivery of Cooper Lake starting in the first half of 2020.
The CPUs were created to give Facebook something with support for bfloat16 instructions.
Previously: Intel to Launch 48-Core "14nm" Cooper Lake and 38-Core "10nm" Ice Lake Xeons in 2020
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Intel will launch Xeon server/HPC CPU chips on two different process nodes and with different core counts, in the same year:
Intel's next-generation Xeon lineup which includes 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Cooper Lake has been further detailed in a slide showcased by ASUS during an IoT seminar. The new Xeon lineup which is supposed to launch in 2020 would be featuring a series of new technologies along with an increase in the total number of cores and PCIe lanes compared to existing Xeon families.
Aimed at the Whitley platform, the Intel 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Cooper Lake would be launching in 2020. The 14nm Cooper Lake Xeons would launch early in Q2 2020 followed by the 10nm Xeon lineup in Q3 2020. Both families would coexist and we could see the Cooper Lake family be more tuned in terms of clock speeds compared to Ice Lake Xeons due to extensive maturation of the 14 nm process node.
[...] Intel Ice Lake-SP processors will be available in the third quarter of 2020 and will be based on the 10nm+ process node. We have seen earlier slides say that the Ice Lake family would feature up to 28 cores but the one from ASUS's presentation says that it would actually feature up to 38 cores & 76 threads per socket.
The main highlight of Ice Lake-SP processors will be support for PCIe Gen 4 and 8-channel DDR4 memory. The Ice Lake Xeon family would offer up to 64 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and would offer support for 8-channel DDR4 memory clocked at 3200 MHz (16 DIMM per socket with 2nd Gen Persistent memory support). Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors would be based on the brand new Sunny Cove core architecture which delivers an 18% IPC improvement versus the Skylake core architecture that has been around since 2015.
[...] Moving on to the Cooper Lake Xeon family which is based on the 14nm+++ process node, we are looking at up to 48 cores and 96 threads in a socketed design. The current Cascade Lake-SP family offers up to 28 cores in socketed variants while the Cascade Lake-AP SKUs which come in BGA only, offer up to 56 cores and 112 threads with TDPs as high as 400W.
There will also be a 56 core and 112 thread socketed variant in the Cooper Lake family but that is likely to be part of the Xeon-AP line of chips which feature two dies on the same interposer.
Also at Guru3D.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:06AM
imagine that.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:13AM
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Your friendly Audrey Two
This plant is talking to you
Come on and give me a drink
Hey, little lady, be nice
Sure do, I'll drink it straight
Don't need no glass or no ice
Don't need no twist of lime
And now it's suppertime
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:27AM (1 child)
These chips are going to be marketed to a few niche (but large) customers. Don't expect them in consumer or enterprise products.
It's a little surprising that education and research isn't being targeted. AI is a nice little buzzword these days, and all researchers surely want a good AI to run their models. Maybe real researchers are more interested in precision, than in buzzwords.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:40AM
Intel will be pushing their Xe GPUs for AI.
Intel’s Xe for HPC: Ponte Vecchio with Chiplets, EMIB, and Foveros on 7nm, Coming 2021 [anandtech.com]
Analyzing Intel’s Discrete Xe-HPC Graphics Disclosure: Ponte Vecchio, Rambo Cache, and Gelato [anandtech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @02:02AM
TempleOS rare commercial from 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDHf_VGM-pI [youtube.com]
Terry Davis: THEY GLOW - Official Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyFvcQidvI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday March 18 2020, @03:58AM
Coming soon, a line that addresses the serious security concerns, the 10 nm Fantasy Island.