Intel: 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors, Optane Persistent Memory 200, and D7-P5500/P5600 3D TLC NAND SSDs

Intel Corp. introduced its 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI portfolio, enabling customers to accelerate the development and use of AI and analytics workloads running in data center, network and intelligent-edge environments.

As the industry’s first mainstream server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, I3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors makes AI inference and training more widely deployable on general-purpose CPUs for applications that include image classification, recommendation engines, speech recognition and language modeling.

“The ability to rapidly deploy AI and data analytics is essential for today’s businesses. We remain committed to enhancing built-in AI acceleration and software optimizations within the processor that powers the world’s data center and edge solutions, as well as delivering an unmatched silicon foundation to unleash insight from data.” said Lisa Spelman, corporate VP and GM, Xeon and memory group.

Why It’s Important
AI and analytics open new opportunities for customers across a range of industries, including finance, healthcare, industrial, telecom and transportation. IDC predicts that by 2021, 75% of commercial enterprise apps will use AI ⁽¹⁾. And by 2025, it estimates that roughly a quarter of all data generated will be created in real time, with various IoT devices creating 95% of that volume growth⁽²⁾.

Portfolio Breadth and Ecosystem Support for AI and Analytics: These data platforms, coupled with a thriving ecosystem of partners using Intel AI technologies, are optimized for businesses to monetize their data through the deployment of intelligent AI and analytics services.

3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors: The company is extending its investment in built-in AI acceleration in the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors through the integration of bfloat16 support into the processor’s Intel DL Boost technology. Bfloat16 is a compact numeric format that uses half the bits as today’s FP32 format but achieves comparable model accuracy with minimal – if any – software changes required. The addition of bfloat16 support accelerates both AI training and inference performance in the CPU. Intel-optimized distributions for leading deep learning frameworks (including TensorFlow and Pytorch) support bfloat16 and are available through the Intel AI Analytics toolkit. The company also delivers bfloat16 optimizations into its OpenVINO toolkit and the ONNX Runtime environment to ease inference deployments.

The 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Cooper Lake) evolve the company’s 4- and 8-socket processor offering. The processor is designed for deep learning, VM density, in-memory database, mission-critical applications and analytics-intensive workloads. Customers refreshing aging infrastructure can expect an average estimated gain of 1.9x on popular workloads⁽³⁾ and up to 2.2v more VMs ⁽⁴⁾ compared with 5-year-old 4-socket platform equivalents.

Optane persistent memory: The company also announced the Optane persistent memory 200 series, providing customers up to 4.5TB of memory per socket to manage data intensive workloads, such as in-memory databases, dense virtualization, analytics and high-powered computing.

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D7 P5500 3D NAND SSD

3D NAND SSDs: For systems that store data in AFAs, the company announced the availability of its next-gen high-capacity 3D NAND SSDs, the SSD D7-P5500 and P5600. They are built with the firm’s TLC 3D NAND technology and a new low-latency PCIe controller to meet the intense IO requirements of AI and analytics workloads and advanced features to improve IT efficiency and data security.

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First AI-optimized FPGA: The company disclosed its upcoming Stratix 10 NX FPGAs, its first AI-optimized FPGAs targeted for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI acceleration. They will offer customers customizable, reconfigurable and scalable AI acceleration for compute-demanding applications such as natural language processing and fraud detection. Stratix 10 NX FPGAs include integrated high-bandwidth memory (HBM), high-performance networking capabilities and new AI-optimized arithmetic blocks called AI Tensor Blocks, which contain dense arrays of lower-precision multipliers typically used for AI model arithmetic.

OneAPI cross-architecture development for ongoing AI innovation: As the firm expands its AI product portfolio to meet diverse customer needs, it is also paving the way to simplify heterogeneous programming for developers with its oneAPI cross-architecture tools portfolio to accelerate performance and increase productivity. With these tools, developers can accelerate AI workloads across the firm’s CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, and future-proof their code for today’s and the next gens of the company’s processors and accelerators.
Enhanced Intel Select Solutions portfolio addresses IT’s top requirements: The company has enhanced its Select Solutions portfolio to accelerate deployment of IT’s most urgent requirements highlighting the value of pre-verified solution delivery in rapidly evolving business climate. announced are 3 new and 5 enhanced Select Solutions focused on analytics, AI and hyper-converged infrastructure. The enhanced Select Solution for Genomics Analytics is being used around the world to find a vaccine for Covid-19 and the Select Solution for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN is being used to enhance remote learning.

Availability:

The 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors and Optane persistent memory 200 series are shipping to customers. In May, Facebook announced that 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are the foundation for its newest Open Compute Platform (OCP) servers, and other CSPs, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, have announced they are adopting the next-gen processors. General OEM systems availability is expected in 2H20.
The SSD D7-P5500 and P5600 3D NAND SSDs are available.
The Stratix 10 NX FPGA is expected to be available in the 2H20.

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Resource:
Video: Unmatched AI and Analytics Platform from Intel

⁽¹⁾ IDC, Worldwide Storage for Cognitive/AI Workloads Forecast, 2018-2022, #US43707918e, April 2018
⁽²⁾ IDC, Edge computing, 5G and AI – the perfect storm for government systems, Shawn McCarthy, April 8, 2020
Configurations:
⁽³⁾ 1.9x average estimated gain on popular workloads with the new 3rd Gen Xeon Platinum 8380H processor vs. 5-year old platform. See claim 11.
⁽⁴⁾ Up to 2.2x more VMs with the new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable platform and SSD Data Center Family vs. 5-year old 4-socket platform. See claim 4..