Intel’s Xeon-D Skylake Processors: Here’s Everything We Know

Dec. 2, 2017

Intel is undoubtedly one of the world’s biggest chipset manufacturer. From consumer devices to workstation powerhouses, Intel is the most preferred brand for processors. Recently, Intel released their EPYC benchmarks, that will be released to compete against AMD’s EPYC server processor lineup. As part of this announcement, Intel also announced the upcoming changes to their Xeon Scalable Platform. Alongside the highlighted announcements of “110+ performance world records” and “200 OEM systems shipping”, Intel also announced that the next iteration of their Xeon-D processors will be getting an upgrade to the Skylake-SP cores.

The next generation of Xeon-D processors will finally see Intel’s server line-upmake the switch to Skylake from the previous generation’s Broadwell architecture.With the Skylake architecture, there are two versions: Skylake-S and the Skylake-SP. While the former uses a standard ring bus and a known L2/L3 cache hierarchy, the latter one relies onusing a substantial AVX-512 unit. This unit,alongside a mesh networking topology, accounts for a larger core size in the upcoming Xeon-D processor. That being said, chances are that Intel will still set themaximum number of cores to 16on the Xeon-D processors unless they decide to change the 45W/65W TDP that has carried on from the first generation of their server class processors. As for the memory compatibility, it seems as the processor will stillrely on ECC capable DDR4 RAM. However, there is still no word on the maximum supported capacity.

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