At Hot Chips on Monday, Intel said its 5th-gen Xeon server platform will include an energy efficient Sierra Forest processor with 240% higher performance per watt compared to the previous generation.
Sierra Forest and a performance-focused Xeon CPU called Granite Rapids are due out next year, amid a crescendo of public interest in energy efficiency matched with the need for greater processing power to handle AI workloads including generative AI.
Intel boasted its Xeon line already enables better AI performance than any other CPU and Granite Rapids will boost up to 300% over the previous 4th gen product.
Fifth gen Xeon code-named Emerald Rapids is already sampling with customers and will launch this fall, Intel said.
Across the entire Xeon line, Intel emphasized that the SoCs increase scalability and flexibility. Both the Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids share IP, firmware and OS software, with the fastest DDR.
Intel customers will be able to consolidate older software onto fewer servers in a data center, the company said.
Ronak Singhal, a senior fellow at Intel, said customers could consolidate as many as 15 different servers onto a single new chip to drive down total cost of ownership.
In March, Intel pushed its Xeon agenda along the same timeline announced Monday at Hot Chips. It competes with several others in the server market, including Nvidia and AMD and has focused on its advantage of using next-generation CPUs and not necessarily GPUs, which are heavily controlled by Nvidia.
At the time, analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates said Intel was “getting very serious about filling the weak spots it had over the past couple of years in the data center, cloud and AI spaces…Those who have considered Intel a dead horse in the race need to do a reassessment.
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