Intel Xeon Powers Baidu's Cloud Servers

On September 5, 2023, Baidu Intelligent Cloud made a significant announcement regarding the availability of its latest offerings. The company introduced multiple sixth-generation BCC (Baidu Cloud Compute) cloud server instances and unveiled the sixth-generation Elastic Bare Metal instances. These new offerings are powered by the fourth-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and showcase Baidu Intelligent Cloud's cutting-edge hardware virtualization technology enhancements.

This latest generation of instances represents a holistic improvement across various dimensions, including basic performance, versatility, and feature set. The advancements not only cater to a diverse range of application scenarios, meeting users' demands for superior computational power and cost-efficiency but also play a pivotal role in fostering innovation and excellence in the AI landscape. These offerings contribute to the acceleration of digital transformation across various industries, providing a robust computational foundation.

Li Ya Li, Vice President of Marketing Group and General Manager of Cloud and Industry Solutions in China at Intel Corporation, emphasized, "Amid the rapid development of artificial intelligence, Intel remains committed to driving technological innovation and delivering high-performance computing solutions for cloud data center customers. The fourth-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, with their native AI acceleration capabilities and overall performance enhancements, empower Baidu Intelligent Cloud to establish an efficient AI-driven cloud infrastructure."

Xie Guangjun, Vice President at Baidu, noted, "The future of cloud services revolves around intelligent upgrades, underpinning the ongoing digital transformation across diverse sectors. Our sixth-generation cloud servers, bare metal instances, and associated products are engineered to deliver the utmost computational power and efficient AI development capabilities. We prioritize AI Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and AI Platform as a Service (PaaS), aligning with users' evolving needs. The comprehensive support from the fourth-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® AMX, and other state-of-the-art technologies encompasses computational prowess, AI acceleration, memory expansion, and data security."

The sixth-generation BCC cloud servers from Baidu Intelligent Cloud, spanning computing and general-purpose instance families (c6/g6), memory instances (m6), and local SSD instances (l6), along with the sixth-generation Elastic Bare Metal instances, integrate Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) acceleration engine. This integration empowers users to effortlessly harness powerful native AI capabilities on any instance, catering to the demands of complex computing scenarios driven by the wave of digital transformation. Intel AMX, integrated into the fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, is purpose-built for AI workloads, featuring a new instruction set and circuit design that deliver significant efficiency improvements in tasks such as image recognition and object detection. It supports various data formats, including INT8 and BF16, to accelerate a wide spectrum of AI models. This expansion of AI computational power seamlessly extends to more instances, benefiting users who utilize standard instance families.

Thanks to the new generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors and their innovative performance core microarchitecture design, the newly introduced cloud server instances have undergone comprehensive product upgrades in terms of computing, storage, and network capabilities. In comparison to the previous generation of instances with similar specifications, they achieve a maximum overall performance improvement of up to 70%1. Key highlights include:

· A significant boost in processing speed, achieving breakthroughs in low latency and single-threaded performance.

· For compute-intensive tasks, the introduction of high-frequency instance families supporting a maximum base frequency of 3.1GHz and an all-core turbo frequency of 3.4GHz.

· Support for advanced memory and next-generation I/O technologies, including DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and CXL 1.1, resulting in substantial performance enhancements across multiple instance families in different storage layers.

· Ultra-high throughput to enhance the efficiency of IO-intensive operations.

· Large-core instance families with 2 x 100Gbps underlying capabilities, facilitating bidirectional VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) connections with a 150%2 increase in maximum network bandwidth compared to the previous generation.

· Support for Elastic RDMA Interface (ERI).

This announcement marks a significant step forward in the realm of cloud computing and AI infrastructure, offering enhanced capabilities and performance for organizations seeking to thrive in the digital age. Baidu Intelligent Cloud's collaboration with Intel underscores the commitment to delivering state-of-the-art solutions that empower innovation and drive efficiency across various industries.