Intel Launches 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" CPUs With Up To 40 Cores

[rlx01]

The Ice Lake SKUs look comparatively cheaper than the Milan though not as fast $ per $. There’s more “range” in Ice Lake.

It used to be that the 7452 was at a sweet spot in terms of price/performance with Rome and there really isn’t Milan part that fits that.

Hopefully this puts some pricing pressure on AMD and Milan.

[coder]

While briefed in advance, we have yet to be seeded with any review samples for independent testing.

I think I know why!

[piotrj3]

From one side impressive gains.

From 2nd side - intel sleeped too long to compete there, and probably needs to do similar jumps like this one for 2-3 generations.

[coder]

Not sure I'd want to be intel's PCIe-4 guinea pig though. The entire server ecosystem of PCIe-4 cards was validated on EPYC. No doubt there will be all kinds of bugs with using these devices on Intel.

Raptor Computing had POWER-based PCIe 4.0 systems shipping, for like 6 months before AMD launched support for it!

There are also ARM-based systems, like those by Ampere and Amazon, that feature PCIe 4.0. Both in full production for about a year, now.

And Intel had PCIe 4.0 support in Comet Lake, until they pulled it at the last minute. So, this isn't even Intel's first go at PCIe 4.0, nor is it a particularly novel feature at this point.

Plus, Ice Lake has been incubating for so long that they & their partners should've had plenty of time for compatibility testing & fixes. Basically, it should be the best-tested Intel server platform that Intel has ever launched!

[coder]

So this is 70% more cores and 80% the price of last gen, using a node that was delayed for several years and seems to have poor yields. I imagine Intel's profit margins on these chips will be some of the worst they've seen.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15580/intel-cfo-our-10nm-will-be-less-profitable-than-22nm

[coder]

Ohhh...it'll hit 320+ Watt TDP easy in real world usage. It'll hit this now with certain benchmarks.

Their server CPUs tend to stay within the specified power envelope. In datacenter environments, Watts = $$$ and power limit transgressions tend not to go unnoticed. So, I don't expect Intel will even attempt the sort of games they've been playing with consumer CPUs. The nearest they'll get is upping their max TDP to 270 W.

But the even CLEARER takeaway is oddly this. The 80 core ARM based Ampere Altra is the winner ... 50 PERCENT INCREASE in memory bandwidth over Ice Lake SP and 10 PECENT over Milan

Huh? Their Stream Triad benchmark shows the peak of Altra is only 10.8% above that of Ice Lake SP. Milan is the one losing out, there (except in very lightly-threaded workloads).

But, it's important to note that this is a very specialized benchmark and isn't meant to characterize the performance of the memory subsystems in general usage. As noted in that review, Altra wins only by virtue of a trick used to optimize away 1/4th of the transactions by recognizing that specific access pattern. I'm not saying they're just trying to game the benchmarks, but that trick won't apply in many/most situations.

The ARM based Ampere Altra even beats both Milan and Ice Lake Muti-threaded benchmarks.

In most cases, they're testing it in NUMA mode. That's fine for people planning to deploy it with VMs that neatly fit within those 20-core partitions, but not so much if you've got a larger-scale shared-memory workload.

Even in NUMA mode, it's hardly a clean sweep. The 1S Altra takes wins in 5/10 specint 2017 tests and one tie. In specfp 2017, it gets wins in 4/12 and about 2 ties. In the cumulative scores, it loses to the 2S Epyc 7763 on int, because a noted weakness of the Altra is worse multi-socket scaling. And the cumulative scores for fp has even the 1S Altra ranking behind Rome.

Suspiciously absent from Anandtech's spec benchmarks is any testing of the Altra in monolithic mode.

So, the best CPU has a lot to do with how well your workload & intended configuration matches up against the tests where Altra (or one of the others) did well.

What the Anandrech article about Ice Lake does is paradoxically show that the ARM based Ampere Altra .... And for Muti-threaded workloads it's the winner REGARDLESS cost or TDP.

The Age of ARM is here. x86 is now legacy.

No, it doesn't. If you were half as enthusiastic about paying attention to the details as you seem to be about cheering on ARM's ascendancy, you'd have seen that. Anandtech cast the Altra in the best light at nearly every turn (i.e. by using 1S in quadrant mode), and it still didn't emerge as the clear winner.

I'm not anti-ARM. I'm just trying to be realistic. You can still celebrate how competitive Altra is, even though it didn't get the kind of clean-sweep you're claiming.

[coder]

haha you nailed it... the time of intel is over. if someone want X86_64 he buy AMD and if someone don't care about X86_64 then he buy ARM Ampere Altra...

in absolutly no case someone should buy inte..

It gets a few wins in AVX-512 heavy workloads and such. Also, its support for Optane DIMMs could be important for some.

But Intel's main strength is its production capacity. AMD doesn't have anywhere remotely close to the wafer allocation from TSMC needed to satisfy global demand for server CPUs. Nor does Ampere or anyone else. So, the reality is that we still need Intel, and they will sell plenty of CPUs just by virtue of availability, as much as anything else.

[coder]

Oh...yeah...almost forgot. That ARM based Ampere Altra SOC? Yeah...there is no "Base" clock or "Turbo" clock for a certain few of the entire core count but not all cores simultaneously.

All 80 cores of the Ampere Altra run at 3.3 Ghz. All the time.

That's a weakness, not a strength! The ability to boost some cores when others are idle is a feature, and it's one that I'm sure you'll praise in future ARM server CPUs, when they get it.

[coder]

One of the reasons I ran out an purchased an Apple M1 based Air is that I wanted to send a message to Intel and frankly most of the other big PC vendors that I don't think much of the X86 world they have created.

Instead, the message they'll likely hear is that you're just another Mac addict who will buy Apple at any price (and any CPU technology).

[TemplarGR]

Too much FUD in favor of ARM here. While i agree that Intel/AMD duopoly/cartel have done little favors to the market, and they are way overpriced, ARM is still in no position to replace them in the foreseeable future.