Section by Ian Cutress
The launch of Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors has been in the wings for a number of years. The delays in Intel’s 10 nm manufacturing process have resulted in a number of setbacks to all of Intel’s proposed Intel products, especially the Xeon family with high performance: trying to manufacture 660 mm2 of silicon during a process is at its best. times difficult. But Intel has 10 nm in a place where it’s economically viable to start selling large Xeon processors, and the official launch today of Intel’s 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable is on the back of over 200,000+ units shipped to major customers to date. The new flagship, the Xeon Platinum 8380, has 40 cores, offers PCIe 4.0 and utilizes the IPC gain in Intel’s Sunny Cove processor core. We test it to the best in the market.
Intel’s 3rd Generation Xeon scalable: 10pm goes business
Today Intel announces the full stack of processors among the 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable Ice Lake brand, built on its 10 nm process. These processors, up to 40 cores per socket, are designed exclusively for single socket and dual socket systems and compete in a market with other available x86 and Arm options. With this new generation, Intel’s offering aims to be twofold: first, the generation increase compared to 2nd Gen, but also the story of selling a solution rather than simply selling a processor.
Intel’s messages with its new Ice Lake Xeon Scalable (ICX or ICL-SP) steer clear of simple single-core or multicore performance, and instead include the unique feature set, such as AVX-512, DLBoost, cryptographic acceleration and security, along with appropriate software optimizations or linked to specialist Intel family products, such as Optane DC Persistent Memory, Agilex FPGAs / SmartNICs or 800 Series Ethernet, provide better performance and better benchmarks for those who purchase the systems. This approach, Intel believes, puts it in a better position than its competitors that offer only a limited portion of these features, or that do not have the infrastructure to unite these products under one easy-to-use brand.
A wafer of 40-core Ice Lake Xeon 10nm processors
However, the introduction of a new generation of products and an extensive portfolio guarantees that the product must be actively tested for its demands for basic performance. This generation Xeon Scalable, Intel’s first at 10 nm, uses a newer architecture of the Sunny Cove core. The benefits of this core, as explained by Intel, start with an extra 20% increased performance increase, made possible by a much wider core with an improved front-end and more export resources. Outside the core, memory bandwidth is improved by increasing memory channels from six to eight, but also new memory pre-recovery techniques and optimizations that increase bandwidth to 100% with another 25% efficiency. The mesh connection between the cores also uses updated algorithms to drive IOs to and from the cores, and Intel promotes better power management through independent power management agents within each IP block.
In addition, Intel relies on acceleration features, saying that software optimized for these accelerators will be better than the generation of the software. It starts with the basic core layout, especially when it comes to SIMD commands like SSSE, AVX, AVX2 and AVX-512: Intel offers better cryptography support in its ISA, allowing AES, SHA, GFNI and other instructions to run simultaneously all vector instructions. AVX-512 improved the frequencies during more complex bit operations for ICX with a smarter mapping between instructions and power consumption, providing an additional 10% frequency for all 256 bit instructions. On top of that, Intel’s Speed Select technologies, such as performance profile, base frequency enhancements, turbo frequency enhancements and nuclear power support, ensure the best performance per core or the quality of service during a heavily used system, depending on customer requirements. Other new features include Software Guard Extensions, which allow enclave sizes up to 512 GB per socket on certain models.
Ice Lake’s Sunny Cove Core: Part 2
The Sunny Cove core is actually already in the market. Intel has made a consumer variant of the core and a server variant of the core. Ice Lake Xeon has the server variant, with larger memory and slightly different optimization points, but it is the consumer variant that we have seen and tested in a laptop form. Sunny Cove is part of Intel’s Ice Lake notebook processor portfolio, which we reviewed on August 1stst 2019, which was 614 days ago. The time between enabling a notebook kernel and enabling the same kernel (with server upgrades) for businesses is almost unheard of, but an indication of Intel’s manufacturing difficulties.
Nevertheless, during testing of the Ice Lake core book, we saw a raw performance of 17-18% in the previous generation, but it was at the expense of 15-20% in frequency. Where the product really excelled was in memory-limited scenarios, where a new memory controller offers better upliftment than generation. When it comes to this generation of Xeon Scalable processors with the new core, as you can see in the review, we get a similar story in non-accelerated workload. That being said, consumer hardware is very often TDP limited, especially laptops! With the new Ice Lake Xeon platform, Intel increases the peak TDP from 205 W to 270 W, which also offers additional performance benefits.
The main law: Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8380
The main prefect of Intel’s new processor range is the Platinum 8380 – a full-fat 40 core. If we put it side by side with the previous processors, there are some important specifications to note.
| Intel Xeon Comparison: 3rd Generation vs. 2nd Generation Peak vs Peak |
||
| Xeon Platinum 8380 |
AnandTech | Xeon Platinum 8280 |
| 40/80 | Kere / drade | 28/56 |
| 2900/3400/3000 | Basic / ST / MT Questions | 2700/4000/3300 |
| 50 MB + 60 MB | L2 + L3 case | 28 MB + 38.5 MB |
| 270 W | TDP | 205 W |
| PCIe 4.0 x64 | PCIe | PCIe 3.0 x48 |
| 8 x DDR4-3200 | DRAM Support | 6 x DDR4-2933 |
| 4 TB | DRAM Capacity | 1 TB |
| 200 Series | Optane | 100 Series |
| 4 TB Optane + 2 TB DRAM |
Optane capacity By connection |
1 TB DDR4-2666 + 1.5 TB |
| 512 GB | SGX Enclave | No |
| 1P, 2P | Socket Support | 1P, 2P, 4P, 8P |
| 3 x 11.2 GT / s | UPI links | 3 x 10.4 GT / s |
| $ 8099 | Price (1ku) | $ 10099 * 6258R, 2P Variant is only $ 3950 |
Between these processors, the new flagship has a number of positive aspects:
- + 43% more cores (40 versus 28),
- the cupboard almost doubles,
- + 33% more PCIe lanes (64 vs 48),
- 2x the PCIe bandwidth (PCIe 4.0 versus PCIe 3.0)
- 4x the memory support (4 TB vs 1 TB)
- SGX Enclave Support
- + 7% higher band-to-foot bandwidth
- DDR4-3200 Optane DCPMM 200 Series Support
- The price is 20% lower … or 100% higher when compared to 6258R
Although we need to highlight some of the negative aspects:
- TDP is + 32% higher (270 W at 205 W)
- ST frequency is off (3400 MHz versus 4000 MHz)
- MT frequency is off (3000 MHz versus 3300 MHz)
If we combine the specification skin cores and the overall (MT) frequency, Ice Lake actually has about the same efficiency as the previous generation. Modern high-performance processors often work well outside the peak efficiency window, but if Ice Lake is at a lower frequency, it usually indicates that Ice Lake needs to work closer to the peak efficiency point to stay within a suitable TDP than previous generations. This is similar to what we saw in the laptop space.
Features in all Ice Lake Xeon scalable processors
We’ll go into the different processors on the next page, but it’s worth noting some of the key features that apply to all of Intel’s new ICL-SP family. Over the ~ 40 new processors, including all the media-focused components, the network-focused processors, and all the individual optimizations used, all the processors will have the following:
- All Ice Lake Xeons support eight channels of DDR4-3200 at 2DPC
- All Ice Lake Xeons support 4 TB DRAM per socket
- All Ice Lake Xeons support SGX enclaves (the size will vary)
- All Ice Lake Xeons support 64x PCIe 4.0 lanes
- All Ice Lake Xeons support three UPI links at 11.2 GT / s
- All Silver / Gold / Platinum Xeons Support 200 Series Optane DC Continuous Memory
In the past, Intel has often produced some of these features, selling them at a higher cost. This segmentation is often due to the lack of competition in the market. This time, however, Intel decided to unite part of its segmentation for consistency. The most important thing in my mind is memory support: at the beginning of the Xeon Scalable family, Intel started charging extra for high-capacity memory models. But given the competition that now offers 4 TB / socket at no extra cost, it would seem that Intel has decided to merge the stack with one memory support option.
Intel 3rd Generation Xeon scalable: new socket, new motherboards
Ice Lake Xeons, now with eight memory channels rather than six, needs a new socket and new motherboards. Ice Lake has 4189 pins and requires a Whitley motherboard from LGA4189-4. It differs from the LGA4189-5 ‘Cedar Island’ used for Cooper Lake, and the two are not interoperable, but they share a power profile.
This actually brings us to a point about Intel’s portfolio. Technically, 10pm Ice Lake is not the only member of the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Family – Intel decided to bundle both Cooper Lake and 10nm Ice Lake under the same heading. Intel distinguishes the two by stating that Cooper Lake is focused on several specific customers with large volumes who want to implement four- and eight-socket systems with specific AI workload. By comparison, Ice Lake is for the mass market, and is limited to two sock systems.
Ice Lake and Cooper Lake both have the ‘3’ in the processor name indicating the third generation. Users can know which Cooper Lake is because it ends in H or HL – Ice Lake processors (as we will see on the next page) never have H or HL. Most Cooper Lake processors are Platinum models anyway, with some Xeon Gold. If we go through this review, we will focus exclusively on Ice Lake, as it is the platform that Intel is selling to the mainstream.
This review
In the run-up to this launch today, Intel provided us with a 2U system featuring two of the top models of Ice Lake Xeon: we have dual 40-core Xeon Platinum 8380s! At the same time, we also spent a dual Xeon Gold 6330 system from Supermicro, which has two 28-core processors, and serves as a good comparison to the previous generation Xeon Platinum 8280.
Today’s review is about the processor stack, our benchmarks, power analysis, memory analysis, and some initial conclusions.