Intel has officially announced their new workstation processor lineup, with Xeon Scalable and Xeon W versions aimed at both professional and mainstream workstation systems.
"Workstations powered by Intel Xeon processors meet the most stringent demands for professionals seeking to increase productivity and rapidly bring data to life. Intel today disclosed that the world-record performance of the Intel Xeon Scalable processors is now available for next-generation expert workstations to enable photorealistic design, modeling, artificial intelligence (AI) analytics, and virtual-reality (VR) content creation."
The first part of Intel’s product launch announcement are the new Xeon Scalable processors, first announced in July, and these are dual-socket solutions targeting professional workstations. Versions with up to 56 cores/112 threads are available, and frequencies of up to 4.20 GHz are possible via Turbo Boost. Intel is emphasising the large performance impact of upgrading to these new Xeon processors with a comparison to older equipment (a trend in the industry of late), which is relevant when considering the professional market where upgrades are far slower than the enthusiast desktop segment:
“Expert workstations will experience up to a 2.71x boost in performance compared to a 4-year-old system and up to 1.65x higher performance compared to the previous generation.”
The second part of announcement are new Xeon W processors, which will be part of Intel’s mainstream workstation offering. These are single-socket processors, with up to 18 cores/36 threads and Turbo Boost frequencies up to 4.50 GHz. The performance impact with these new Xeon W CPUs compared to previous generations is not as great as the Xeon Scalable processors above, as Intel offers the same comparison to older hardware with the Xeon W:
“Mainstream workstations will experience up to a 1.87x boost in performance compared to a 4-year-old system4 and up to 1.38x higher performance compared to the previous generation.”
Full PR is available from Intel's newsroom.
AMD’s Epyc Single Socket
AMD’s Epyc Single Socket 7401P offers 24 core/48 Threads at the price of $1075 and the Epyc motherboard supports 128 PCIe lanes and 8 memory channels. So just how many of of these Epyc SKUs can be purchased for the pice of the Intel 18 core(Unlisted price as of yet at Anandtech) CPU SKU alone.
The 8 core/16 thread Xeon W-2145 costs $1113 and that’s 139.13(rounded) per core while the Epyc 7401P costs 44.79(rounded) per core. That Epyc 7401P platfrom is even more affordable on a per core basis that even the consumer Threadripper’s per core pricing, and that’s some impressive single socket workstation pricing on that Epyc 7401P if it’s a better deal than even a consumer SKU. I guess Intel is trying to sale the turbo clocks, but for workstation workloads it’s mostly going to be how the all core clocks can be managed at the highest rates over longer periods of time that some workstation rendering workloads are run.
And look at that Epyc 7401P pricing well I could probably have a nice little workstation cluster of 2 full Epyc 7401P builds coming in at the price of one of these 18 core Intel SKU base system builds. And that “up to 56 cores/112 threads are available” is going to cost way more than that.
Those Epyc 8 channel motherboards are going to be abe to be populated with more of the lower cost 4GB/8GB ECC DIMMs also and a single DIMM per channel for the higest memory clocks also. I mean damn that 24 core/48 thread Epyc 7401P part is less than that 8 core/16 thread Xeon W-2145 part and Epyc’s 8 full memory channels and 128 PCI lanes of a single socket Epyc Motherboard support is a great deal.
Intel’s pricing is way over the top on these SKUs compared to AMD’s pricing and Intel’s workstation SKUs have never been that affordable.
This is the first actual
This is the first actual conformation that Skylake-X Xeons for LGA 2066 are A Thing. Up until now we’d assumed they were coming, but there hadn’t been an official peep (or even leaks) to indicate their existence.