4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids 4
Today we have the launch of the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable. We’ve been testing the new chips for months, and now it’s time to dive deep into what Sapphire Rapids is and why it’s important to the industry. Without a doubt, the launch of Sapphire Rapids is a huge step forward for Intel. At the same time, the competitive landscape has changed. The answer to “How good is this new processor?” has changed significantly over the last decade from being a black-and-white answer to shades of “it depends.” Let’s get down to business with this introduction.
4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids: The Video
If you want to learn more, here is the video for this piece.
We have a lot more detail in this article, but if you decide to podcast this later (you can even speed it up), feel free to check out an accessible overview. As always, we recommend opening this video in another window, tab, or app for a better viewing experience.
Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Context: Today’s Market
We wanted to take a moment and just see where we are in the market today. About two months ago we had the launch of the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa. While we reviewed some Genoa platforms, OEMs were slower to ship us systems, mainly due to availability. There’s no doubt that the AMD EPYC 9654 is the current king of x86 performance per socket. AMD has 96 cores with decent clock speeds, while Intel tops this generation with 60 cores. This puts the heart of the server CPU market in the 16-64 core range.
Supermicro SYS 221H TNRR 2U Intel SPR CPU and memory 5
Intel has a very interesting value proposition: acceleration. As you will see in this review, Xeon is waging an asymmetric war with EPYC in this generation. Intel’s main bet is that by embedding a high degree of acceleration into its processors, relative performance per core becomes much higher than if it were aiming for higher clock speeds or x86 pipeline improvements alone.
4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Network and Edge Overview
To be clear, that’s a risk Intel is taking on multiple fronts this generation. First, investing transistors in on-chip acceleration, if this acceleration is not embraced, is an expensive burden for all customers. Second, on workloads that don’t use acceleration, these transistors are “dead weight.” Third, accelerators can provide new security interfaces that need careful consideration. Make no mistake, Intel is aware of these risks and feels the benefits outweigh the costs. As we will show, the relative performance per core increases when these accelerators are used. In a world of per-core licensed software, this is Intel’s secret weapon, but it’s also the biggest point of attack.
4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Acceleration Engines Enablement
In the introductory materials that Intel is showing and others are discussing, you’ll hear the benefits of acceleration. This is Intel’s main advantage in this generation. Looking at three of the four big new accelerators simultaneously, QAT, DLB and IAA, less than 45% of SKUs have actually activated them. DSA is the only accelerator on each SKU, but only 27% of SKUs have the full DSA configuration, and most SKUs only have a quarter of the accelerator capacity. Perhaps the strangest part of the launch is that Intel has been discussing acceleration in Sapphire Rapids for months, it’s the company’s key competitive advantage, but more than half of the SKUs either use accelerators little or don’t have them enabled.
4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids 11
One of the most exciting parts of this introduction is really the whole platform and what a server is. With this generation we get DDR5, PCIe Gen5, CXL and 50% more cores per socket along with these accelerators. This is a massive leap in platform capability and performance beyond the CPUs themselves, so we’ll be covering that in this article as well.
Supermicro SYS 111C NR 1U Intel SPR Overview
In this article we will cover them as much as possible, but there are market segments that we cannot cover. For example, in this generation, Intel has up to 60 cores per socket, AMD “Genoa” has up to 96 cores, but if someone asks which company has more cores per system, it’s actually Intel. While our launch focuses on single and dual socket servers, Sapphire Rapids is a new 4 socket and 8 socket capable platform and we could see an 8 socket platform about a month before launch. We were also unable to test the Intel Xeon Max series with integrated HBM2e memory. Still, performance per socket, performance per core with/without acceleration, performance per node, etc. are all valid considerations for servers, but we can only cover so much in this test.
SPR Lstopo Platinum 8490H
We usually start our journey by looking at the core and platform. The product SKUs are so important to the discussion that we need to look at those first. Without this context, it is difficult to understand the scale and impact of the systems. So let’s move on to the SKUs.