Today Intel has announced that it will be holding a launch event on April 6th for the new vision of its Data Platform Group. This event is set to ‘unveil the next chapter’ in all the areas that Intel’s DPG touches, from edge to cloud, as well as offering an early look at 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable systems, which we’ve come to understand is the Ice Lake Xeon platform. Key speakers at the event include Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger.

 

Update 3/22:

Intel has formally clarified today that this event on April 6th will be the formal official launch of 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake). Official start time for the event is 8am PT on April 6th.

 

How Wonderful Gets Done 2021

Subtly dropped in my email today as part of the Intel weekly on data center progress, the company have announced a ‘How Wonderful Gets Done 2021’ event built upon the Data Platform Group’s progress as well as the vision for the segment of Intel looking to the future. The key headliner, present in our email but not on Intel’s website, is that the event will host an ‘early look at 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based systems’. It is unclear if this means CPUs or just OEM designs, or if we’ll see benchmarks, but it is clear that Intel’s OEM partners are practically ready to go based on some of the published data already available.


From the email

One of the accompanying videos on the event website is a 10 second montage of things forming the letter ‘X’, and the words ‘what will you solve for’.

The event will be held on Tuesday April 6th, starting at 8am PT, with keynotes from new Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, EVP and GM of DPG Navin Shenoy, and CVP and GM of the Xeon and Memory Group, Lisa Spelman.

Sessions for the day will include:

  • AI, Wei Li, VP and GM of Machine Learning Performance, Design Engineering Group
  • IoT, John Healy, VP IOTG, GM Platform Management and Customer Engineering
  • 5G Networking, Dan Rodriguez, CVP and GM, Network Platforms Group
  • HPC, Trish Damkroger, VP and GM HPC, Data Platfoms Group
  • Cloud, Rebecca Weekly, VP and GM, Hyperscale Strategy; Senior Principle Engineer, DPG

Recently it was announced that Pat Gelsinger will be hosting an event on March 23rd, and in that announcement an image of an Ice Lake Xeon Scalable wafer was given as the title image for that announcement, perhaps indicating that the release of ICL-SP is close. Intel did say at the beginning of the year that ICL-SP is expected to launch ‘within months’, and a number of Intel’s partners are already starting to demonstrate systems with appropriate processor support.

We also learned recently that Intel has already shipped 115K+ (and more) Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors to over 30 of its high-profile customers, even though the processors have not yet been launched. This is typical for a server processor, as these customers also help test, debug, and deploy the hardware at scale so it is ready to go from day one.

Similarly, in discussions with Intel, it is clear that the company is keen to promote its combined solution efforts to the market when it comes to the data center – Intel’s value, according to the company, is in its ability to provide the CPU, the networking, the memory, the storage, the AI accelerators, the software, the optimizations, the range of options, and the support structure that its competitors cannot. This combined solution Intel believes affords its customers a better TCO offering, as well as better optimized performance especially now that workloads are hitting a variety of bottlenecks such as storage, connectivity, and acceleration.

We are all set up for the event and will be watching along. If there are opportunities to ask questions, you bet we will.

Source: Intel

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  • Operandi - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link

    Intel's CPU archs are impossible to keep track of.... So Ice Lake is Sunny Cove 10nm ++ something, something, but Tiger Lake is Willow Cove 10nm++ something else?

    So..... Sunny Cove is only for Xeon why? I guess I don't get why there isn't a desktop version of this if 10nm now to the point where they can make chips this big at this performance. Like why bother with Rocket Lake, this has to be better?
  • drothgery - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link

    Sunny Cove was in Ice Lake U (10xxGx mobile) and is now in Ice Lake SP (Xeons and maybe a Core-X variant?); it's on what most press calls Intel's 10nm+ but Intel just calls 10nm and pretends Canon Lake never happened.

    Willow Cove is in Tiger Lake U (11xxGx mobile), should be in Tiger Lake H very soon (11xxxH mobile), and I think it's in Sapphire Rapids (Xeons and maybe a Core-X variant?). That's 10nm SuperFin (or 10nm SF) in Intel's terminology but would have been 10nm++ previously.

    Cypress Cove is in Rocket Lake desktop chips (11xxx), and is a backport of Sunny Cove to 14nm.

    Golden Cove will be in Adler Lake (12th gen, supposedly for mobile and desktop). That'll be 10nm Enhanced SuperFin or 10 nm+++ if you like that better. If the code name for the Xeon based on it has leaked, I haven't heard it.

    Meteor Lake (haven't heard the CPU core code name) in Q1 2023 is supposed to be on 7nm, I think.
  • Operandi - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link

    I read that and the next thing I remember is waking up on the floor with my face in small pool of drool. Not sure how long I was out for.....
  • JayNor - Monday, April 5, 2021 - link

    Sapphire Rapids has Golden Cove cores.
  • EthiaW - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link

    Perhaps intel is simply too ashamed to launch these products because they cannot beat AMD Millan even in cherrypicked workloads.
  • mode_13h - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link

    AVX-512 is their usual go-to, when they want to gin up some good-looking benchmarks. I think it's also responsible for a fair bit of Rocket Lake's claimed IPC improvements.
  • PaulHoule - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link

    Weren't the Xeons the bad guys in Gundam? Didn't they crash one of O'Neill's Island 3 colonies into NYC or something like that?

    I have been offering my services as a branding consultant to firms like

    https://x-energy.com/

    who want to name a high-temperature gas cooled reactor "Xe" and I can't tell if they are talking about the Xenon-135 radioactive pollutant or the notorious low performance graphics card architecture. Going high end is like Trabant competing in F1.

    Best thing that can happen for those two letters is that Dell buys a bunch of OEM-only graphics cards and discreetly trucks them to a landfill in Lousiana like those E.T. cartridges from Atari.
  • mode_13h - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link

    Exactly. Different spelling but same pronunciation: Zeon

    And exactly how high do you have to be to pitch the idea of naming a GPU line after an elemental symbol frequently pronounced as "xenon", when one of your main and most venerable CPU brands is Xeon? Likely the same genius who thought it was a good idea to inject precious metal names into their server CPU models... exactly the market that is *most* specs-focused and *least* likely to get fooled by bling!

    On numerous occasions, over the years, I've even heard people misread or misremember Xeon as "xenon". Intel is just *begging* for market confusion!

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