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Intel Announces Cascade Lake With Up To 56 Cores and Optane Persistent Memory DIMMs (tomshardware.com)
At its Data-Centric Innovation Day, Intel today announced its Cascade Lake line of Xeon Scalable data center processors. From a report: The second-generation lineup of Xeon Scalable processors comes in 53 flavors that span up to 56 cores and 12 memory channels per chip, but as a reminder that Intel company is briskly expanding beyond "just" processors, the company also announced the final arrival of its Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs along with a range of new data center SSDs, Ethernet controllers, 10nm Agilex FPGAs, and Xeon D processors. This broad spectrum of products leverages Intel's overwhelming presence in the data center, it currently occupies ~95% of the worlds server sockets, as a springboard to chew into other markets, including its new assault on the memory space with the Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs. The long-awaited DIMMs open a new market for Intel and have the potential to disrupt the entire memory hierarchy, but also serve as a potentially key component that can help the company fend off AMD's coming 7nm EPYC Rome processors.
This new top-end CPU comes in at 400w and requires water cooling. Who the hell wants water cooling in the data center!? This just seems like a massive disaster waiting to happen. Also, they're no longer socketed, but instead soldered directly to the motherboard, just like SoCs.
Unless this Optane is very different from the Optane that Intel has been selling as a hard disk cache, the number of writes per bit before failure falls very short of medium-grade SSDs. That's okay for a lightly used consumer laptop but will soon fail as a disk cache in a heavily used system. Main-memory for a server is even worse - they'll run through the expected life in months, if not weeks.