Intel's Skylake Xeons are among the most anticipated tech that will launch this year. This morning, the company confirmed the naming scheme it'll be using when those processors come to market. Skylake datacenter parts will launch under the "Xeon Processor Scalable" umbrella, and that lineup will comprise chips in "Platinum," "Gold," "Silver," and "Bronze" sub-families. The logic behind this branding will be immediately obvious to anybody who's ever watched the Olympics.
Intel says the Scalable lineup will replace its Broadwell Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 CPUs. Today's announcement is largely about branding, but the company did confirm several new features coming to at least some Xeon PS chips. The biggest new feature in these chips might be the introduction of the Advanced Vector Extensions 512, or AVX-512, instruction set outside parts in the Xeon Phi family. Xeon PS parts will also introduce a technology called Volume Management Device, or VMD, that the company says will allow for hot-plugging of NVMe devices and minimal service disruptions during those hot-plug operations.
According to briefing slides from Anandtech, Intel will also be offering Xeon PS customers parts with integrated controllers for the company's Omni-Path HPC fabric, Ethernet, and QuickAssist software-defined infrastructure accelerators. Those slides suggest that the Altera FPGA tech and Nervana deep-learning tech that Intel has acquired of late will remain complementary accelerator cards instead of on-die integrations.
Intel says the Xeon Processor Scalable family will arrive in "mid-2017."
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