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.

Comments

Also with 56 vulnerabilities for CIA, NSA and FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

The fucking company is literally called "Intel"!

56 cores?

[CODiNE]

I don't know if I could handle having a 56 core processor when the whole time I'll know... deep inside. It's not an 8x8 array of cores in there. :|

Compare to nvidia

[slashnot007]

highend consumer GPUs have about 56 streaming multiprocessors. Each multi-proprocessor can run 2 to 4 SIMT ops on 32 four-byte numbers at a time. These MP are slower than a typical CPU

This intel will have 56 cores and each core presumably has 4 four-byte simd channels. It will likely hyperthread (maybe not) and have pipelined instructions and predictive branching and larger caches.

These things might actually start closing the gap with GPUs and then have all the great general purpose advantage of CPUs.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Re:Compare to nvidia

[Lonewolf666]

Each multi-proprocessor can run 2 to 4 SIMT ops on 32 four-byte numbers at a time. These MP are slower than a typical CPU

Key phrase is "2 to 4 SIMT ops on 32 four-byte numbers at a time". That is some pretty massive parallelism. The "32 four-byte numbers at a time" would be the equivalent of a hypothetical AVX-1024.

Overall I would be surprised if Cascade Lake can match a GPU for massively parallel stuff. Also, the TDP is even more obscene than in a Radeon VII. Up to 400W
( o_o)

Re:Compare to nvidia

[TomGreenhaw]

With AVX instructions, I believe that each core can perform 32 fused add/multiply operation per clock cycle. These are critical for machine learning applications and with 56 cores should allow cascade lake to perform on a par with GPUs. VNNI (vectorized neural network instructions) also will help close any gap in neural networks as well.

One of the biggest challenges in machine learning is moving data around from storage and OSs to the machine learning hardware for training and execution. General purpose CPUs typically have direct high performance access to data and this can have a dramatic effect on overall system performance and ease of implementation.

Re:Compare to nvidia

[godrik]

> With AVX instructions, I believe that each core can perform 32 fused add/multiply operation per clock cycle.

With AVX-512, architectures should have 32 FMA per cycle single precision. So that should be 7TFlops single precision.

Intel was playing with half precision, I wonder they are going to go that route and give us 14TFlops half precision.

400w

[darkain]

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.

Re:400w

[TheDarkMaster]

And using Optane as (slow) RAM, when the thing have a finite life? No thanks.

Re:400w

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

Mainframes used to use water cooling. See old IBMs.

Power RF uses water cooling.

Power machinery uses water cooling.

Internal combustion engines use water cooling.

Do it right and it's reliable.

Re:400w

[ASCIIxTended]

Or use mineral oil, like old Crays did. Mineral oil does not conduct electricity.

Persistent Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what you want... persistent memory... so your keys are easier to steal and the government can see what you were doing when they broke in and stole all of your computers.

Re:Obligatory Risitas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he mention how many data vulnerabilities this chip has due to shared memory and mutually cached areas?

For much the same reason the US's first army ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Re:Why is it called "intelligence" anyway ... and not "spying" or "surveillance" or, even better, "data kraken"?

For much the same reason the US's first army, back during the revolution, was called the "Second Army" or the atomic bomb project was called "The Manhattan Project.

It's the "Fog of War": The name is not for clarity. It's a tool to advance the organization's objectives.

When the enemy is battling the Second Army, his attention is distracted, wondering if the First Army is about to attack from behind or on another flank. You get that extra wound on his efforts for free, just by choosing a name.

Calling it "Intelligence" rather than "spying" (which is only a PART of it, anyhow), makes it more palatable to the rulers and funders, resulting in more resources and less interference.

It's also a pun: By providing extra information and analysis of it to military decision makers, it enables (thogugh doesn't guarantee) better decisions, much as making them smarter might do.

Re:Optane write-cycles

[sexconker]

There's a reason Micron bowed out of the relationship, neglected to release any 1st generation products, (and looks to not be releasing any 2nd generation products), and has instead doubled down on their investment into traditional DRAM design and manufacturing. 3D Xpoint (Optane) does not meet any of the specs they've claimed it would (even after revising them all, unfavorably, by multiple orders or magnitude). It needs several more years in the oven, and even then it may not pan out.

Re:Persistent Memory Use Case?

[sexconker]

As soon as Intel and its partners find one, they'll let you know.

I think MS SQL supports it, maybe in some preview build not sure. But to that end, why not just use the already-existing functionality of memory optimized tables, persisted memory DBs, etc.? The only real advantage Optane has is capacity per price, but it sacrifices speed and longevity (down to traditional flash or worse) to get it.

It offers a transparent non-volatile storage, but we've had transparent, disk-backed RAM drives for ages. Optane also sidesteps SATA/AHCI/NVMe overheads for better latency, but once you're at NVMe there's not too much raw performance to be gained in latency. And if you do need that small edge, using traditional DRAM is the better choice. You just need to make sure it writes out to disk transparently and can survive power failures. Again, we've had this shit for ages.

Re:For much the same reason the US's first army ..

[hackertourist]

I don't buy that. "intelligence agency" is not a good example of obfuscation, because its meaning is instantly obvious to anyone, unlike, say, "Manhattan project".

One of the definitions of 'intelligence' is "the faculty of understanding". In this case, the faculty of understanding your enemies.

Gathering data is just the first part of what an intelligence agency does. The real value is in analyzing that data into a coherent picture of what your enemy is capable of and what he will do next.

Re:Optane write-cycles

[KingMotley]

One more:
https://www.anandtech.com/show...

Write endurance for the 983 ZET also falls short of the bar set by Intel's Optane SSDs, with 8.5 DWPD for the 480GB 983 ZET and 10 DWPD for the 960 GB model, while the Optane SSD debuted with a 30 DWPD rating that has since been increased to 60 DWPD.

And that is comparing Samsung's latest (released last month) SSD specifically designed to try and compete with Optane. In some respects it does good, and in others not so much. It's latency is 30us vs optane's 10us, and its write IOPS is pretty poor at 75K IOPS, vs 550k IOPS. But if all you do a read, and you read in a heavily loaded server, then it does well with 750k IOPS vs Optane's 575k IOPS. That isn't really a likely scenario for most workloads, and its write speed and latency differences will kill it.

Optane has a better price ($1299 vs $1999), lower latency, higher write IOPS in all scenarios, higher read IOPS in low queue depths, and higher endurance.
Z-NAND has a read IOPS with high queue depths.

I'd buy the Optane, hands down.