Intel Xeon D "Granite Rapids-D" Processors Coming In 2025

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Xeon D "Granite Rapids-D" Processors Coming In 2025

Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Granite-Rapids-D-2025

[uid313]

288 cores! Very nice for the cloud!
Who will be the to make a CPU with 1000 cores?

[skeevy420]

288 cores! Very nice for the cloud!
Who will be the to make a CPU with 1000 cores?

AMD. They could do that now with one large ass socket and infinity fabric. I really hope AMD comes out with Socket LAS1.

I also wonder the thread count. Even in Intel's press release they only mention the core count of 288. Thread count will give away the P/E ratio.

Here's what I'm thinking: 288-256=32. My guess is 256p/32e cores or 512p/32e threads making it 544 threads total.

[Dawn]

AMD. They could do that now with one large ass socket and infinity fabric. I really hope AMD comes out with Socket LAS1.

I also wonder the thread count. Even in Intel's press release they only mention the core count of 288. Thread count will give away the P/E ratio.

Here's what I'm thinking: 288-256=32. My guess is 256p/32e cores or 512p/32e threads making it 544 threads total.

Sierra Forest is 288c E-core only. No P-cores. Intel has stated outright that at this time there is no plan to do heterogeneous server CPUs.

[skeevy420]

Sierra Forest is 288c E-core only. No P-cores. Intel has stated outright that at this time there is no plan to do heterogeneous server CPUs.

I haven't read that yet. I probably glossed over it somewhere and didn't even realize it. Thanks.

Oh fsck me running. It was the third sentence of the article

[sophisticles]

Unfortunately none of the articles say what Granite Rapids D actually is, other than it's the successor to Ice Lake D.

So taking a look at Ice Lake D shows specially built processors for AI, with hardware accelerators in the form of BGAs, and other AI specific enhancements.

Presumably Granite Rapids D will offer more accelerators and more performance at lower power envelopes.

[sophisticles]

288 cores! Very nice for the cloud!
Who will be the to make a CPU with 1000 cores?

You do not want that, what you want is someone to take all those execution units and put them into one core and include a hardware thread scheduler.

[Volta]

You do not want that, what you want is someone to take all those execution units and put them into one core and include a hardware thread scheduler.

Poor engineers. They didn't come up with this brilliant idea.

[sophisticles]

Poor engineers. They didn't come up with this brilliant idea.

Engineers rarely make the decisions, the people that usually drive a company's product strategy is the sales department.

Look at the IBM's Power 10:

The Power10 chip is available in two variants, defined by firmware in the packaging. Even though the chips are physically identical and the difference is set in firmware, it cannot be changed by the user nor IBM after manufacturing.^[8]

• 15× SMT8 cores
  • Optimized for high throughput but less compute intensive applications
• 30× SMT4 cores
  • Optimized for highly compute intensive applications that require complex instruction sets and multiple cycles for information loaded into cache

Cores are an artificial construct, a way of segmenting the units that a chip contains, as a way of better utilizing the resources by allowing the OS to better allocate instruction threads.

At least that's what they tell us.

But the reality is that it makes no difference if you have an 8 core processor with 8 ALU and 8 FPU or a single core processor with 8 ALU and 8 FPU, you still have the same number of execution units.

But it's much easier to sell upgrades when you market a chip with more cores and more threads rather than a chip with the same cores as the previous model, even if it has more execution units.

It also allows software vendors, like Red Hat and Microsoft, that charge by the core count, to charge more.

Make no mistake, cores are a scam to sell more chips and drive the forced upgrade cycle.

There's no such thing as cores, there's just artificial segmentation of execution units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10