The final presentation of the Hot Chips event this week is from Intel, with a talk on its next generation Xeon Scalable platform, Cascade Lake. We recently learned about Intel’s Xeon Roadmap at the recent Datacenter Insider Summit, consisting of Cascade Lake in 2018, Cooper Lake in 2019, and Ice Lake in 2020, and now Hot Chips is the first chance for Intel to add some more information to the mix. Previously this would have been done at events like IDF, over several hours, but Intel only has 30 minutes on stage here. We picked up the slides before the presentation.
Intel is using the opportunity to expand on Cascade Lake’s previously announced features: new instructions for machine learning by taking advantage of the AVX-512 unit, and how the platform is set to be protected / hardened against attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown. We also have confirmation about how the new Optane DIMMs, Apache Pass, will be enabled through the platform.
Unfortunately, for those expecting an IDF-like substantial talk about the design of the chips, how the SKUs will be separated, or what the product stack will look like, this was not it. We have a feeling that Intel will be drip feeding information about Cascade Lake in this manner.
However, Intel’s main play here is that a significant amount of the server and enterprise industry desperately want Spectre and Meltdown hardened processors, and will pay for them. When Intel stated that they expect Cascade to be their fastest ramping processor, make no mistake that this is likely to be true, for the reasons of security. The question marks will obviously come on price, which has yet to be announced, but Intel could easily argue ‘how much is security worth?’.
