Intel on Wednesday launched its third-generation Xeon Scalable processor ‘Ice Lake’ in South Korea.
The new chip supports edge, hybrid cloud and high performance computing.
Intel said Ice Lake has 46% increased performance for data center workload.
Each processor can support up to 40 cores, which allows for up to 2.65 times the performance of systems of five years ago.
Ice Lake will also support up to 6TB of system memory, up to eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory and 64 lane PCIe Gen 4 per socket.
Intel said the new chip will offer over 1.5 times performance in cloud, 5G, Internet of Things, HPC and artificial intelligence.
The new chip is made through 10-nanometer process. Rival AMD has launched its own server processor Epyc 7003 last month that was 7-nanometer.
Intel Korea vice president Nah Seung-ju said the Gen 3 Xeon has better built-in technology compared to its competitor’s counterpart, at an online press conference.
AI accelerator’s performance has increased 74%, Intel said. The US chip giant claimed Gen 3 Xeon had 1.5 times better performance compared to AMD Epyc 7763 and 1.3 times the performance of Nvidia A100 GPU in processing AI workloads.
The new chip also comes with Intel SGX, which protects code and data within system that could be potentially vulnerable.
Intel said it has already supplied over 200,000 units of the new processor to cloud service providers in the first quarter. Over 50OxM partners have come up with over 250 designs. Over 15 telecommunication equipment and services companies are preparing to use the chips for POC and networking. Gen 3 Xeon is also being used in over 20 HPC labs and HPC-as-a-service environments, Intel said.
In South Korea, SK Telecom is using the chips in Ethernet adapter and network function virtualization solutions for its 5G network. South Korea’s weather agency is building its fifth supercomputer using the chip. The new supercomputer will have 8 times the performance of 5800TFlops of the current system.
Intel is also collaborating with local companies Teratec, Sendia and Uniquest in commercializing Xeon.
Xeon Scalable platform will include Optane Persistent Memory 200 series, Optane SSD P5800X, D5-D5316 NAND SSD and Ethernet 800 series network adapter. It will also offer over 500 IoT market-ready solutions and select solutions. Intel Select Solution will be updated by up to 80% by the end of the year.