Intel’s newest platform designed for the data center is its highest performance, most versatile ever

By Lisa Spelman

Today is a big day, one of those “once-in-a-career” kind of days. Around the world, Intel launched the all-new Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, our highest-performance, most versatile data center platform ever. We’ve been asked if this is really the biggest data center advancement in the industry in a decade, as we like to call it, and let me tell you that it most certainly is.

News Release: Intel Unveils Powerful Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, Bringing Next-Generation Business and Consumer Experiences to Life Press Kit: Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family

Digital transformation is accelerating. Every industry – transportation, retail, manufacturing, health care, professional services, even farming – is improving and streamlining through digital change. Highly adaptable, software-defined, on- or off-premise clouds are replacing fixed-function infrastructure. Data that would have been stored in the equivalent of digital shoe boxes, never to be seen again, is now activated with powerful analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), revealing new insights and opportunities. Autonomous vehicles will require teraflops of compute power every hour they are on the road, air or water. No matter the game, it is being changed.

Five years ago, I was in Intel IT. I could not have imagined that a single platform could have the versatility to cover compute, storage and communications in a modern data center – but our amazing engineers did it. With up to 28 of the highest-performance cores, the all-new Intel Xeon Scalable platform can support up to 4.2x more virtual machines¹ and up to 5x more transactions per second² than 4-year-old systems. Configured for storage, it delivers up to 5x more IOPS at up to 70 percent lower latency³ to quickly commit data to storage or bring it forward for analysis. For communications, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform can power emerging 5G networks, offering up to 2.5x better performance for key networking applications.⁴

All the customers we serve – cloud and communications service providers, enterprises, HPC and AI engineers – can fuel their digital transformation with the Intel Xeon Scalable platform. Our early-ship customers are already seeing great results. For example, AT&T* is already running production traffic and has seen a major performance improvement using 25 percent fewer servers per cluster.⁵ Customers on the Google* Compute Platform have seen up to 40 percent more performance, and more that 100 percent more performance when the application includes optimization for Intel® AVX-512 instructions.⁶ And leading content creator Technicolor* reduced time to render virtual reality content by almost 3x,⁷ freeing up valuable time for their most creative employees.

Beyond the hardware, something that makes Intel truly unique is our ability to align the data center ecosystem to fully unleash the platform’s performance and provide a jumping-off point for ongoing industry innovation. Over the past five years, we’ve worked with leading software companies, contributed to open source communities, and released tools and libraries that help developers take full advantage of the performance and security features of the Intel Xeon Scalable platform. Our Cloud, Fabric, Network and Storage Builders programs helped more than 480 companies accelerate and optimize their solutions and publish reference architectures. I believe Intel knowledge shared with the ecosystem is value unlocked for our customers.

The combined power of Intel platforms, ecosystem partnerships and performance engineering come together in another of today’s announcements: Intel® Select Solutions. Intel Select Solutions are optimized hardware/software configurations targeting today’s complex data center and communications network workloads. Specified and tested by Intel, these solutions can reduce IT’s evaluation and testing burden, accelerate time to deployment, and increase confidence they will enjoy reliable solution performance.

This breakthrough platform took years of mind-bending work by thousands of brilliant people around the world, and I can’t sign off this post without thanking the entire Intel team, along with the systems manufacturers, service providers and developers that invested so much energy to make all this possible. I heap superlatives upon you, for you have truly earned them.

Yes, today is a very big day, indeed.

I invite you to learn more about how the Intel Xeon Scalable platform family can transform your data center and take your business to new heights at www.intel.com/xeonscalable.

Lisa Spelman is vice president and general manager of the Data Center Marketing Group at Intel Corporation.

Results have been estimated based on internal Intel analysis and are provided for informational purposes only. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance.

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance/datacenter.

¹ Up to 4.28x more VMs based on server virtualization consolidation workload: Based on Intel® internal estimates 1-Node, 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2690 on Romley-EP with 256 GB Total Memory on VMware ESXi* 6.0 GA using Guest OS RHEL6.4, glassfish3.1.2.2, postgresql9.2. Data Source: Request Number: 1718, Benchmark: server virtualization consolidation, Score: 377.6 @ 21 VMs vs. 1-Node, 2 x Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 Processor on Wolf Pass SKX with 768 GB Total Memory on VMware ESXi6.0 U3 GA using Guest OS RHEL 6 64bit. Data Source: Request Number: 2563, Benchmark: server virtualization consolidation, Score: 1580 @ 90 VMs. Higher is better

² Up to 5x claim based on OLTP Warehouse workload: 1-Node, 4 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 on Emerald Ridge with 512 GB Total Memory on Oracle Linux* 6.4 using Oracle 12c* running 800 warehouses. Data Source: Request Number: 56, Benchmark: HammerDB, Score: 2.46322e+006 Higher is better vs. 1-Node, 4 x Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 Processor on Lightning Ridge SKX with 768 GB Total Memory on Red Hat Enterprise Linux* 7.3 using Oracle 12.2.0.1 (including database and grid)

³ 5x IOPS and 70 percent lower latency claims based on the following configurations.

⁴ 5X networking claim based on the following configurations, and measures IPSEC forwarding rate in Gbps

⁵ Source: AT&T

⁶ Source: Google

⁷ Source: Technicolor