What’s New: Intel today introduced its 3rd Gen Intel®
Xeon® Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI
portfolio, enabling customers to accelerate the development and use of
artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics workloads running in data center,
network and intelligent-edge environments. As the industry’s first mainstream
server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, Intel’s new 3rd Gen Xeon
Scalable processors makes AI inference and training more widely deployable on
general-purpose CPUs for applications that include image classification,
recommendation engines, speech recognition and language modeling.
“The ability to rapidly
deploy AI and data analytics is essential for today’s businesses. We remain
committed to enhancing built-in AI acceleration and software optimizations
within the processor that powers the world’s data center and edge solutions, as
well as delivering an unmatched silicon foundation to unleash insight from
data.” –Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Xeon
and Memory Group
Why It’s Important: AI and analytics open new opportunities for
customers across a broad range of industries, including finance, healthcare,
industrial, telecom and transportation. IDC predicts that by 2021, 75% of
commercial enterprise apps will use AI1. And by 2025, IDC estimates
that roughly a quarter of all data generated will be created in real time, with
various internet of things (IoT) devices creating 95% of that volume growth2.
Unequaled Portfolio Breadth
and Ecosystem Support for AI and Analytics: Intel’s new data platforms, coupled with a thriving
ecosystem of partners using Intel AI technologies, are optimized for businesses
to monetize their data through the deployment of intelligent AI and analytics
services.
· New 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors: Intel
is further extending its investment in built-in AI acceleration in the new 3rd
Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors through the integration of bfloat16 support
into the processor’s unique Intel DL Boost® technology. Bfloat16 is a compact
numeric format that uses half the bits as today’s FP32 format but achieves
comparable model accuracy with minimal — if any — software changes required.
The addition of bfloat16 support accelerates both AI training and inference
performance in the CPU. Intel-optimized distributions for leading deep learning
frameworks (including TensorFlow and Pytorch) support bfloat16 and are
available through the Intel AI Analytics toolkit. Intel also delivers bfloat16
optimizations into its OpenVINO® toolkit and the ONNX Runtime environment to
ease inference deployments.
The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon
Scalable processors (code-named “Cooper
Lake ”) evolve Intel’s 4-
and 8-socket processor offering. The processor is designed for deep learning,
virtual machine (VM) density, in-memory database, mission-critical applications
and analytics-intensive workloads. Customers refreshing aging infrastructure
can expect an average estimated gain of 1.9 times on popular workloads3 and
up to 2.2 times more VMs4 compared with 5-year-old 4-socket
platform equivalents.
· New Intel Optane persistent memory: As
part of the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform, the company also announced
the Intel Optane™ persistent memory 200 series, providing customers up to 4.5TB
of memory per socket to manage data intensive workloads, such as in-memory
databases, dense virtualization, analytics and high-powered computing.
· New Intel 3D NAND SSDs: For
systems that store data in all-flash arrays, Intel announced the availability
of its next-generation high-capacity Intel 3D NAND SSDs, the Intel SSD D7-P5500
and P5600. These 3D NAND SSDs are built with Intel’s latest triple-level cell
(TLC) 3D NAND technology and an all-new low-latency PCIe controller to meet the
intense IO requirements of AI and analytics workloads and advanced features to
improve IT efficiency and data security.
· First Intel AI-optimized FPGA: Intel
disclosed its upcoming Intel Stratix® 10 NX FPGAs, Intel’s first AI-optimized
FPGAs targeted for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI acceleration. These FPGAs
will offer customers customizable, reconfigurable and scalable AI acceleration
for compute-demanding applications such as natural language processing and
fraud detection. Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs include integrated high-bandwidth
memory (HBM), high-performance networking capabilities and new AI-optimized arithmetic
blocks called AI Tensor Blocks, which contain dense arrays of lower-precision
multipliers typically used for AI model arithmetic.
· OneAPI cross-architecture development for ongoing
AI innovation: As Intel expands its advanced AI product
portfolio to meet diverse customer needs, it is also paving the way to simplify
heterogeneous programming for developers with its oneAPI cross-architecture
tools portfolio to accelerate performance and increase productivity. With these
advanced tools, developers can accelerate AI workloads across Intel CPUs, GPUs
and FPGAs, and future-proof their code for today’s and the next generations of
Intel processors and accelerators.
· Enhanced Intel Select Solutions portfolio addresses
IT’s top requirements: Intel has enhanced its Select
Solutions portfolio to accelerate deployment of IT’s most urgent requirements
highlighting the value of pre-verified solution delivery in today’s rapidly
evolving business climate. Announced today are three new and five enhanced
Intel Select Solutions focused on analytics, AI and hyper-converged
infrastructure. The enhanced Intel Select Solution for Genomics
Analytics is being used around the world to find a vaccine for
COVID-19 and the new Intel Select Solution for VMware Horizon VDI on
vSAN is being used to enhance remote learning.
When Products
are Available: The 3rd
Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory 200
series are shipping to customers today. In May, Facebook announced that 3rd Gen
Intel Xeon Scalable processors are the foundation for its newest Open Compute
Platform (OCP) servers, and other leading CSPs, including Alibaba, Baidu and
Tencent, have announced they are adopting the next-generation processors.
General OEM systems availability is expected in the second half of 2020. The
Intel SSD D7-P5500 and P5600 3D NAND SSDs are available today. And the Intel Stratix
10 NX FPGA is expected to be available in the second half of 2020.