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

[smitty3268]

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.

Indeed. The AMD and Intel servers Anandtech tested could also easily run at 3.2GHz and 3.0Ghz all the time. That's a couple hundred Mhz slower than the Altra, sure, but it's all around the same speed (and noticeably faster than the ARM Graviton). The fact that the x86_64 servers have the option to boost some cores faster than that when possible is nothing but an added benefit.

[s_j_newbury]

I'm laughing my ass off here because "die bitch" could be taken two ways. After all she helped promote the use of chiplets or small dies to make big processors.

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. I'm just tired of the high prices and low quality machines the like of HP and others have been shipping. Frankly the performance of most x86 laptops is pretty terrible especially if you try to do work while on battery power. In the end I spent years looking at iPads wishing that they where real computers, something that actually worked well on battery power.


But it is nice to see. Now Intel is taking broadsides in every category and I couldn't be happier to see it!!!! Even their choke hold on laptops is evaporating right in front of them. Apple basically has grabbed the very low power segment with AMD taking a great deal of what remains. The only thing Intel has going for it is brand loyalty which is significant. However if one is objective it is really hard to justify Intel in any market segment .

I know Apple gets a lot of grief in these forums, some of it well deserved, but if they encourage other manufactures to take ARM seriously in laptops then I have to applaud Apple. I'd love to see Lenovo get serious about ARM and deliver an ARM based laptop that doesn't suck. It doesn't even need to support Windows, through a Linux distro on it and call it a day.

I would definitely be in the market for a mobile workstation class ARM Linux laptop. I've never seen such a thing though, unfortunately. Maybe it will happen after Apple proves it works?

[PerformanceExpert]

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.

You do realize that ~15% of all of AWS instances is Graviton? That sounds like Arm is displacing x86 already.

[torsionbar28]

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

They sure did, but the downside was very little support for any PCIe AIC's. The few that were supported, appeared to have been qualified by Raptor themselves, rather than by the card manufacturer, so it seems there was little to no 3rd party validation going on there, at least at the time.

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.

Yup, with Big Cloud as the primary market, the only PCIe4 validation occurring was for the short list of cards specific to those cloud implementations. As much as I like Ampere and the idea of an ARM server, it's still very much a niche market that gets deployed in specific use cases, or for specific cloud implementations, and does not attract broad platform validation from the industry.

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.

It's a novel feature for intel *servers*, as Ice Lake is the very first Intel server product with support for it.

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!

I guess we'll see. "Incubating" is an awfully polite word for Intel's major design and manufacturing problems in recent years. The fact is, AMD has had shipping product in customer hands for years now. GP-GPU servers like those from NVidia have standardized on EPYC for its PCIe4 support and high lane count. Intel has been absent. It's hard to validate a platform that exists only on paper. Intel is in catch-up mode. How much ground they still have to cover in terms of PCIe4 validation remains to be seen.

FWIW my employer has historically been an Intel shop, but the most recent round of server procurement was 100% EPYC, $3.1m worth of EPYC servers, to be precise.

[edwaleni]

I look at this release and wonder what if it had come out on time. I think the storylines would be much, much different. And in the interim of getting Ice lake out the door, I am sure they were working on their own internal enhancements, enhancements we will see (hopefuily) over the next few years.

Now they are getting their fab situation under control, makes me wonder how backed up the product pipeline is and how performant they will be.

I am not for any vendor, I am for performance value.

[Weasel]

You do realize that ~15% of all of AWS instances is Graviton? That sounds like Arm is displacing x86 already.

Sounds like NIH to me.

[angrypie]

I look at this release and wonder what if it had come out on time. I think the storylines would be much, much different.

IIRC Zen 2 was supposed to compete with this, and in the AT review ICL gets beaten by Zen 2 Epyc in many benchmarks.

[Jumbotron]

I love how you legacy x86 guys are still trying to defend this increasingly moribund and aged architecture.

Ampere will release this year a single socket 128 core Altra. So Milan and Ice Lake are already leapfrogged by ARM.

But right now if I wanted an 800 core Supercomputer I would drop $40,500 USD retail on ten 80 core Ampere Altras. To get a 800 core Intel Ice Lake Super I'd have to drop
$162,000 USD for TWENTY 40 core Ice Lakes.

Later this year all I need to reach an 800 core Super with Ampere is 6.25 Altra CPUs each with 128 cores.

x86 CAN NOT SCALE like this AND keep TDP from going stupid.

x86 is legacy.

[wizard69]

I would definitely be in the market for a mobile workstation class ARM Linux laptop. I've never seen such a thing though, unfortunately. Maybe it will happen after Apple proves it works?

A Mac Book Air is far from what I'd call a mobile workstation but for what it is, the machine is amazing. The performance really is amazing and I'd love to see a more open platform with a more workstation oriented focus. Right now I think of the MBA as a better iPad class machine and for me is a good thing because I could never adapt to the iPads way of doing things. All of this in a passively cooled package that can keep up with more expensive machines.

I just hope that one of the big manufactures, probably Lenovo, goes all in on a true ARM based workstation class laptop. Of course there are already people working on Linux on Apples M1, but unless they get more support from Apple i don't see it being the high quality Linux we have today on other machines. For me that is the key, a system that one can easily install and run Linux on.

[smitty3268]

I love how you legacy x86 guys are still trying to defend this increasingly moribund and aged architecture.

ARM dates back to 1985, which is... 4 years younger than x86.

Ampere will release this year a single socket 128 core Altra. So Milan and Ice Lake are already leapfrogged by ARM.

There will be 128 core Zen 4 chips when it comes out, presumably next year.