Josh Norem
2023-12-06 09:00:00
www.extremetech.com
Intel is poised to launch its 5th Generation scalable Xeon CPUs on Dec. 14. These chips, codenamed Emerald Rapids, will replace the current 4th Generation Sapphire Rapids CPUs and come with increased core counts, bigger cache pools, and faster memory support. Since they use the same socket as the existing chips, they’re just an evolution of the architecture, but despite the modest changes new slides from Intel show big increases in performance. However, since these are marketing slides, a hefty grain of salt is required for their consumption.
The new slides are included in what is labeled as a “Data Centric Processor Roadmap,” which was posted on Twitter via @InstLatX64. The slides begin with the existing 4th Generation chips, and then move onto the 5th generation CPUs, and also include Intel’s data center roadmaps. The slides include the first die shot of Emerald Rapids, and as Wccftech notes, we can see that Intel has gone from using four dies in Sapphire Rapids to just two for Emerald Rapids. Each die comprises 35 cores, with three disabled, which allows for a 64-core design in the flagship model. This is a decent increase from 56 cores in the 4th Gen chips, but obviously less than AMD’s 96-core Epyc CPUs.
Emerald Rapids uses a two-core design, along with 480MB of L3 cache.
Credit: Intel
The slides include many benchmark metrics, showing how the flagship 5th Gen chip compares with its predecessor. As always, performance varies according to the application being used, but the slides show solid gains across various tasks. The biggest gain is in network performance when using the Intel QuickAssist technology, which offers a 240% boost in performance. Most of the gains are in the 20 to 30% range though for tasks like media transcoding and Java, with the huge numbers seemingly reliant on Intel’s optional add-on accelerators, which is one of the key selling points for its scalable processors.
The slides appear to be genuine as they have all the traditional Intel markings, but we’ll have to wait another week to see if they’re real. Emerald Rapids is sort of a stop-gap processor that uses the same Intel 7 manufacturing process and socket as the existing chips but appears likely to offer a sizable uplift despite its modest redesign. The real big changes to the Xeon lineup are all coming next year with Granite Rapids, which will be the company’s first P-core data center CPU using the Intel 3 process (formerly 5nm). It’ll arrive in late 2024 most likely, with the E-core only Sierra Forest CPUs.