Intel chips strike back
Latest update time：2021-04-08
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After years of process delays and aggressive threats from competitors, Intel seems to have gradually returned to the right track in the past six months.
On the one hand, Patrick Gelsinger, a long-time employee and technical expert of the company, returned to his old employer after many years of absence to serve as Intel's CEO, and recalled many of Intel's experts, reserving sufficient "ammunition" for the company's future technical battles; on the other hand, the company has made strategic adjustments, namely the IDM2.0 strategy released earlier. This flexible arrangement allows the chip giant to not only make its own chips, but also free up its hands to embrace the huge business opportunities of wafer foundry; finally, in the face of aggressive competitors such as NVIDIA, AMD and ARM, Intel is also systematically promoting the iteration and update of the company's products. The recently released third-generation Xeon Scalable Processor products and a series of related product portfolios are typical representatives of this.
Lisa Spelman, Intel vice president and general manager of the Xeon Processor and Storage Division, also pointed out that the combination of hardware and software solutions, including data transmission, storage and processing, is the cornerstone of Intel. "Because for Intel, this is a very huge differentiated competitive advantage, which is the core of our data center strategy. We also see that other companies in the ecosystem are trying to emulate this strategy to build their own product portfolios." Lisa Spelman added. Among them, the CPU is the core of Intel's products. The Xeon Scalable Series processors launched by the company in 2017 are a typical representative.
Xeon processors powering data centers around the world
Intel's proud CPU product line can be roughly divided into two categories, one is the Core series for consumer-grade PCs, and the other is the Xeon series for data centers. According to Lisa Spelman, Xeon is the foundation of today's diverse environment. In less than a decade, Intel has deployed more than 1 billion Xeon cores to power the cloud. Since the launch of the first Xeon Scalable processor in 2017, Intel has delivered more than 50 million Xeon Scalable processors to customers around the world, supporting data centers around the world. According to its estimates, more than 800 cloud service providers around the world have deployed servers based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
"We can see that CPU is a key part of the customer's purchase decision, but it is not the only factor. One of the coolest factors is that customers can see the entire product portfolio we provide. By using the entire product portfolio, customers can make complex and important purchase decisions, which is the decision and choice they must make." Lisa Spelman told reporters. "The reason why we have been recognized by so many companies is mainly due to the broad ecosystem we have built around Xeon," Lisa Spelman continued. Based on the above accumulation and experience, Intel launched the third generation of Xeon Scalable Processors.
According to reports, each third-generation Xeon Scalable processor has up to 40 cores, providing customers with ultimate flexibility. In terms of IPC, the new product has a 20% improvement compared to the previous generation 20-core Cascade Lake. In addition to the increase in the number of cores, coupled with built-in acceleration functions, we are able to achieve a truly powerful generational performance improvement. Data shows that the average performance has increased by 46% compared to the previous generation. In the field of artificial intelligence, the reasoning capability of the new generation of Xeon Scalable processors has increased by 74%, which is mainly achieved through continuous improvement of generational processors, platform and software optimization.
Lisa Spelman also pointed out that the third-generation Xeon Scalable processor has three very exciting features:
First, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processor is Intel's first mainstream dual-socket data center processor with SGX Intel Software Guard Extensions technology enabled. Although SGX has been available for several years, this is the first time it has been applied to the Xeon E platform. This gives us the opportunity to apply it to a dual-socket platform to significantly improve our delivery capabilities, enhance security, increase the size of the specified address space, and drive cloud-based confidential computing environments;
Second, the performance and AI performance based on the third-generation Xeon Scalable processor will be stronger. As the only data center processor with built-in AI acceleration to date, the Xeon Scalable processor can be accelerated by Intel Deep Learning Acceleration Technology. In Ice Lake and the new generation of products, Intel has made new slot optimizations and overall solutions to make full use of the Xeon built-in accelerator to achieve better performance improvement.
Third, the processor has built-in Intel's cryptographic operation hardware acceleration, which can reduce the impact of universal encryption on performance.
As mentioned earlier, the reason why Intel has been able to conquer so many customers is that in addition to having hardware with superior performance, the platform including key functions, platform improvements, combined components and solutions is the top priority.
It is understood that the latest third-generation Xeon Scalable Processors are aimed at single- and dual-socket systems. And in the entire third-generation family, some products are suitable for 4- and 8-socket systems. Therefore, as of now, Intel can serve 1, 2, 4, and 8-socket configurations, which allows customers to optimize their node size, achieve higher virtual machine density, reduce stranded resources, and save ownership costs. The third-generation products increase IO bandwidth, the number of memory channels, and the capacity of the Optane persistent memory 200 series, making the entire platform and its processing capabilities refreshing.
"We have specially customized SKUs for every market, from service edge to cloud, which is Intel's unique value. These optimized product portfolios can support the broad needs of today," said Lisa Spelman.
Thanks to the above-mentioned diverse advantages, Intel's third-generation Xeon Scalable Processor has considerable advantages over AMD EPYC 7763 and Nvidia A100 GPU, which has also won it recognition from many customers.
Lisa Spelman said that since the company put Ice Lake into production at the end of 2020, it has shipped more than 200,000 products in the first few months of this year. Looking ahead, the company intends to use its OEM advantages to maximize the market demand for third-generation products. With the help of its 50 excellent OEMs and ODMs, it has launched more than 250 Ice Lake-based designs to the market since April this year to provide services to cloud service providers.
"All major cloud service providers plan to deploy Ice Lake services," emphasized Lisa Spelman.
Delivering value through combined products
When talking about Intel, most people are familiar with it, thanks in part to the company's "Intel Inside" promotional strategy. Through this method, Intel has become a well-known chip brand for consumers, and the core behind it is their X86 series PC processors. As a pioneer, Intel has a very high market appeal in the X86 processor market. Whether it is PC or data center, X86 is indispensable.
But in recent years, with the rise of artificial intelligence, video and various terminal demands, developers have also put forward higher demands on chip performance and types, which has driven Intel to continue to expand the company's product line.
"We all know that customers need more than just CPUs to manage their critical workloads or increase workloads, so we are now upgrading it to a system-level solution, starting with CPUs, XPUs, memory, Ethernet, etc., to help customers solve increasingly complex problems encountered in distributed environments." Lisa Spelman told reporters. She further pointed out that since the last release of new products, the company's product portfolio has become richer, and the company is about to launch cloud intelligent network products to promote these product groups to play an increasingly important strategic role in contemporary data analysis infrastructure. From the three application cases in the figure below, we can clearly see the value brought by Intel's product portfolio.
In order to better and more continuously provide value and solutions to customers, Intel continues to update different product lines and continue the tradition of providing value and solving problems for customers. Recently, in addition to the release of the third-generation Xeon Scalable Processor (Ice Lake), Intel also brought the Optane Persistent Memory 200 Series, Intel Optane SSD P5800X and Intel® D5-P5316 NAND SSD, as well as Intel Ethernet 800 Series Adapters and the new Intel Agilex FPGA, which are new products that Intel has or will soon launch.
First, let's look at the Optane Persistent 200 Series. According to reports, this is Intel's next-generation persistent memory module. The memory bandwidth has increased by 32%, and the memory capacity of each slot can reach up to 6TB.
The second is Intel's latest Optane SSD. According to them, this is the world's fastest data center SSD. Not only has its IOPS increased by 4 times to meet the needs of high-speed networks, but the product's TOS has also increased by up to 6 times to meet customers' stringent SLA requirements. And compared to NAND SSDs, the latency is reduced by 13 times, which can achieve rapid insights.
NAND solid state drive (D5-P5316) is another weapon that must be mentioned in the hardware product library.
From Lisa Spelman's introduction, we learned that Intel used the densest NAND media in this generation of products, providing re-optimized performance and enterprise-level reliability and quality. At the same time, Intel also brought it QLC-level leading durability. Data shows that compared with the previous generation, the durability of the new product is 5 times that of the original QLC SSD. These drive applications are excellent in read-intensive, large-capacity, and high-quality workloads.
The Ethernet Adapter 800 Series is another representative product in Intel's product portfolio. It is reported that the network data throughput of this product can reach up to 200GB/s, which is suitable for application scenarios such as high-performance vRAN, NFV forwarding plane, storage, high-performance computing, cloud and CDN, and can provide up to twice the resources for the density of virtual machines.
Finally, FPGA is also an important reliance of Intel that cannot be ignored.
In 2019, Intel announced the Agilex FPGA product. This breakthrough Agilex FPGA uses Intel's most advanced 10nm SuperFin process technology and is paired with Quartus Prime software. Compared with competitors' 7nm FPGAs, it can achieve more than 2 times the performance per watt. And it can provide the industry's highest data rate. Its superior performance per watt improvement can empower customers in multiple industries including 5G base stations, video, and edge.
These hardware, combined with Intel's investment in software, allow the chip giant to provide customers with 500 system-level solutions, which can help them quickly improve transmission capabilities, design and deploy leading edge infrastructure, fully utilize performance, grasp time faster, and realize real value.
*Disclaimer: This article is originally written by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion. Semiconductor Industry Observer reprints it only to convey a different point of view. It does not mean that Semiconductor Industry Observer agrees or supports this point of view. If you have any objections, please contact Semiconductor Industry Observer.
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