Intel's 5th Gen Xeon: 21% Performance, 36% Efficiency Boost

On December 14th, Intel marked a significant milestone with the official release of its fifth-generation Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed "Emerald Rapids," during the "AI Everywhere" event held in New York. These cutting-edge processors, tailored for servers and data centers, showcase a remarkable 21% increase in average performance, a 36% improvement in energy efficiency, a notable 42% enhancement in AI inference performance, and an impressive 77% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to their predecessors.

Maintaining the Intel 7 manufacturing process, Raptor Cove P-Cove architecture, and LGA4677 package interface, the fifth-generation Xeon introduces strategic upgrades in layout design and core specifications.

In terms of layout, the flagship 64-core fifth-generation Xeon adopts a streamlined 2 Tile Die design (termed XCC), departing from the 4 Tile Die configuration of the previous generation. This design choice, while reducing the number of modules, offers advantages such as minimized data movement, resulting in lower power consumption. Although featuring fewer tiles, the processors boast a larger physical size. This typically raises concerns about yields, but the mature Intel 7 process technology employed in Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids effectively addresses this issue.

Each 64-core flagship Tile in the fifth-generation Xeon is connected through modular bare die integration located between two cores and cache arrays. Each Tile features 35 cores (with 3 disabled), 2 memory controllers, support for DDR5 DIMMs at speeds up to 5600 MT/s, 3 PCIe controllers (totaling 6), 2 UPIs (totaling 4), and 2 accelerator engines (totaling 4).

For lower core count fifth-generation Xeon processors, Intel continues to deploy a single-chip structure known as Medium Core Count (MCC) chips, accommodating up to 32 cores. Additionally, a smaller chip named EE-LCC is available, suitable for configurations with up to 20 cores.

Compared to the fourth generation Xeon, the fifth generation witnesses an increase in core count from a maximum of 60 cores to an impressive 64 cores. It introduces a cache pool of up to 320MB, nearly triple the 112.5MB of the previous generation, translating to an increase from 1.875MB to 5MB per core. The fifth generation Xeon also supports faster DDR5-5600 speeds, with a maximum single-road capacity of 4TB, 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and Intel UPI 2.0 with a bandwidth of 20 GT/s.

Intel asserts that the fifth-generation Xeon CPUs deliver a 21% average performance improvement, a 36% improvement in performance per watt, and a remarkable 77% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to the fourth generation Xeon.

In the realm of AI capabilities, the fifth generation Xeon builds upon the fourth generation's AMX AI accelerator, achieving up to 1.42 times the speed in AI inference. It can fine-tune large language models with 200 billion parameters and remains the sole general-purpose CPU with MLPerf training and inference benchmark performance tests. AI benchmark tests comparing the flagship 64-core Xeon 8592+ to the previous 56-core fourth-generation Xeon 8480+ showcase a 1.4x gain in AI voice recognition and LAMMPS benchmark tests, along with a 1.2x gain in FFMPEG media transcoding workloads.

In terms of SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), Intel's fifth-generation Xeon CPUs are available for 1S and 2S systems, with no 4S and 8S configurations in the product lineup. The flagship Xeon Platinum 8592 series includes three versions: Xeon Platinum 8592+ for general solutions, Xeon Platinum 8592Q for liquid cooling and general solutions, and Xeon Platinum 8592V for cloud-optimized systems. This chip features 64 cores, 128 threads, up to 3.90 GHz turbo frequency, 320 MB L3 cache, and a TDP of 385/350/330 watts.

Overall, the fifth generation Xeon offers diverse configurations, including 60, 56, 52, 48, 36, 32, 28, 24, 16, and 8 cores. In comparison to the fourth generation Xeon, certain core configurations like 44, 40, 20, 18, 12, and 10 cores have been phased out, streamlining the total SKU models from 55 to 28. The highest acceleration frequency range has improved from 1.9-4.2GHz to 3.4-4.1GHz, resulting in a substantial overall enhancement. The base frequency has also increased from 1.7-3.7GHz to 1.9-3.9GHz. With improved performance, the overall power consumption range for the fifth generation Xeon has expanded to 150-385W, compared to the fourth generation's range of 115-350W.