Intel Rolls Out Next-Gen Data Center Portfolio; 100 Gigabit Ethernet, Optane DC, Hewitt Lake, and Cascade Lake With Up to 56 Cores

Intel has been detailing Cascade Lake since late last year, including at Hot Chips 30. The company has also talked a great deal about their DC Persistent Memory. Today all the puzzle pieces are coming together with the launch of their next-generation of their data center product portfolio. The launch is very well rounded with products across their entire product stack – interconnects, storage, compute, and technologies.

Overview

Today, Intel is announcing a number of new products across the entire data center stack. They are briefly summerized below:

• Ethernet – Columbiaville 800 Series Ethernet
• Storage – Optane DC Persistent Memory, SSDs, and NAND Drives
• Compute (HP) – Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable Processors
• Compute (LP) – Hewitt Lake Xeon D Processors
• FPGA – Falcon Mesa 10nm Agilex FPGAs

Note that the FPGAs are discussed in this separate article which incorporates some information from Intel Architecture Day which was held late last year.

Second Gen Xeon Scalable

Second-generation Xeon Scalable are based on the Cascade Lake Microarchitecture. We will iterate over some of the features and expand on some of the new disclosures later on. Intel is keeping most of the Xeon Scalable branding the same. Second generation will simply increment the numbering by 100. A major introduction along with the new lineup is a new Xeon Platinum 9200 series which will discuss in detail later on in this article. The new 9200 series, as the name suggests, is a new tier of higher core and higher performance processors with up to 56 cores in a single socket.

As far as the naming scheme goes, there is still some logical ordering to the numbering scheme, at least by Intel’s standards, but more specialized SKUs were added.

We will go over the meaning of the new specialized workload SKUs later on but for now the main takeaway should be that there are new successor SKUs for the prior Skylake-based models as well as new SKUs special-fit for certain workloads.

2nd-Gen SKUs

There are twenty-eight new Cascade Lake base SKUs and another twenty-seven specialized SKUs. The base SKUs are listed below.

Second Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake)
Model	Price	Cores	Base	Turbo	TDP
Xeon Platinum 8200 Series
8280	$10,009	28	2.7 GHz	4.0 GHz	205 W
8276	$8,719	28	2.2 GHz	4.0 GHz	165 W
8270	$7,405	26	2.7 GHz	4.0 GHz	205 W
8268	$6,302	24	2.9 GHz	3.9 GHz	205 W
8260	$4,702	24	2.4 GHz	3.9 GHz	165 W
8256	$7,007	4	3.8 GHz	3.9 GHz	105 W
8253	$3,115	16	2.2 GHz	3.0 GHz	165 W
Xeon Gold 6200 Series
6254	$3,803	18	3.1 GHz	4.0 GHz	200 W
6252	$3,665	24	2.1 GHz	3.7 GHz	150 W
6248	$3,072	20	2.5 GHz	3.9 GHz	150 W
6244	$2,925	8	3.6 GHz	4.4 GHz	150 W
6242	$2,529	16	2.8 GHz	3.9 GHz	150 W
6240	$2,445	18	2.6 GHz	3.9 GHz	150 W
6238	$2,612	22	2.1 GHz	3.7 GHz	140 W
6234	$2,214	8	3.3 GHz	4.0 GHz	130 W
6230	$1,894	20	2.1 GHz	3.9 GHz	125 W
6226	$1,776	12	2.8 GHz	3.7 GHz	125 W
Xeon Gold 5200 Series
5222	$1,221	4	3.8 GHz	3.9 GHz	105 W
5220	$1,555	18	2.2 GHz	3.9 GHz	125 W
5218	$1,273	16	2.3 GHz	3.9 GHz	125 W
5217	$1,522	8	3.0 GHz	3.7 GHz	115 W
5215	$1,221	10	2.5 GHz	3.4 GHz	85 W
Xeon Silver 4200 Series
4216	$1,002	16	2.1 GHz	3.2 GHz	100 W
4215	$794	8	2.5 GHz	3.5 GHz	85 W
4214	$694	12	2.2 GHz	3.2 GHz	85 W
4210	$501	10	2.2 GHz	3.2 GHz	85 W
4208	$417	8	2.1 GHz	3.2 GHz	85 W
Xeon Bronze 3200 Series
3204	$213	6	1.9 GHz	1.9 GHz	85 W

Frequency

Given Intel’s ongoing 10-nanometers problems and their significant improvements to their 14-nanometer node, it should come as no surprise that Cascade Lake delivers a decent frequency bump for the same thermal design points. This is the easiest and most effective way to improve the single-thread and multi-thread performance assuming nothing else is bottlenecked. Intel claims that compared to the prior generation of Xeon Scalable, the new models provide up to 1.33x the performance of the prior generation. For comparable SKUs – with the same SKU number, same core, and same TDP – the new models have a turbo frequency of about 200 MHz higher. Similarly, for the base frequency, there is a 200 MHz improvement. For a few of the high core count SKUs, we see a 300 MHz and 600 MHz improvements in the base frequency.

Core Count

Just looking at the new models and the naming scheme, it’s easy to see how most SKUs upgrade nicely from Skylake-SP to Cascade Lake SP. For example 28-core 8180 becomes 8280, 28-core 8176 becomes 8276, and 20-core 6148 becomes 6248. There are, however, a number of SKUs that have deviated in some way and those are noted below:

SKU changes
Skylake SP					Cascade Lake SP
6152	22/44	140 W	$3655		6252	24/48	150 W	$3665
6138	20/40	125 W	$2612		6238	22/44	140 W	$2612
6130	16/32	125 W	$1894		6230	20/40	125 W	$1894
5120	14/28	105 W	$1555		5220	18/36	125 W	$1555
5118	12/24	105 W	$1273		5218	16/32	125 W	$1273
5117	14/28	105 W	$????		5217	8/16	115 W	$1522
4116	12/24	85 W	$1002		4216	16/32	100 W	$1002
4114	10/20	85 W	$694		4214	12/24	85 W	$694
4110	8/16	85 W	$501		4210	10/20	85 W	$501