Recently Intel announced some major upgrades to their Xeon CPU line. The long and short of the CPU announcement was that Intel was releasing their 56 Core CPUs for public release. That’s just a massive amount of CPU power that’s available in a very small package. A dual socket server, with two of these CPUs installed, would have 112 cores of CPU power, 224 with Hyper-Threading enabled. That’s a huge amount of CPU power. And if 112 cores aren’t enough for you, these CPUs can scale up to an eight-socket server if needed.
With each one of the processors, you can install up to 4.5TB of RAM on the server, per socket. So a dual socket server could have up to 9TB of RAM. (That’s 36TB of RAM for an eight-socket server if you’re keeping track.)
For something like a Hyper-V or a VMware host, these are going to be massive machines.
My guess is that we won’t see many of these machines are companies. Based on the companies that Intel had on stage at the keynote (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) we’ll be seeing these chips showing up in the cloud platforms reasonably soon. The reason that I’m thinking this way is two-fold; 1. the power behind these chips is massive, and it makes sense that these are for a cloud play; 2. the people who were on stage at the Intel launch were executives from AWS, Azure and GCP. By using these chips in the cloud, the cloud providers will be able to get their cloud platforms probably twice as dense as they have them now. That leads to a lot of square feet being saved and reused for other servers.
As to how Intel was able to get 56 cores on a single CPU, is through the same technique that they’ve used in the past. They took two dies, each with 26 cores on them and made one socket out of that. In the olden days, we’d say that they glued two 26 core CPUs together to make one 56 core CPU. The work that Intel had to do, to make this happen was definitely more complicated than this, but this thought exercise works for those of us not in the CPU industry.
These new CPUs use a shockingly small amount of power to run. The chips can use as little as 27 Watts of power, which is amazingly low, especially when you consider the number of CPU cores that we are talking about. Just a few years ago, these power numbers would be unheard of.
Denny
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