Intel reveals new metal-based naming scheme for Xeon CPUs

It was already rumored for a couple of months but now Intel officially rolls out its new naming scheme for its Xeon server processors. The new Xeon family will feature four metal tiers: bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

Xeon Bronze delivers entry-performance, Xeon Silver offers efficient performance at low power and Xeon Gold offers great performance, fast memory, more interconnect/accelerator engines and advanced reliability. The best performance is reserved for the Xeon Platinum line, this series also offers hardware-enhanced security as well as the best business agility.

The new Xeon CPUs are expected this summer.

At Intel, we take our role as the provider of the foundation of data center computing seriously. That’s why this summer, we will unveil our next-generation Intel® Xeon® processor family (code-named “Skylake”), which represents the biggest set of data center platform advancements in this decade. To reflect the magnitude of the innovations we are bringing to market with this platform, we will rename the family the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family.

The new Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family represents a major architectural leap forward in processor architecture and platform advancements, delivering workload-optimized performance for compute, network and storage. The Scalable family provides the foundation for the next generation of cloud infrastructure to fuel applications as wide-ranging as analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, high-performance computing and network transformation. As we have with every generation of Intel Xeon processor delivery, the Scalable family will also feature breakthrough performance, security and agility.

The Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family is re-architected from the ground up and will be the successor to the Intel Xeon processor E5 and E7 product lines. It will incorporate unique features for compute, network and storage workloads, and impressive performance gains of up to 3.9x higher scalability for virtualized workloads as compared with the 4-year-old systems widely used in the market today, allowing customers to run more and a more diverse variety of workloads on each system.

The Scalable family will feature integrated performance accelerators such as Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT), as well as Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), a new platform capability designed to deliver seamless management of PCIe-based (NVMe) solid state drives, such as the recently launched Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X and Intel® SSD DC P4600 drives. Intel® VMD enables a “hot plug” capability that minimizes service interruptions during drive swaps.

The Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family will offer four levels of performance and capabilities, with a wealth of configuration choice with regard to which integrations and accelerators customers need, and a new tiered model based on metals (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) to make the options simple and efficient to choose.

This new platform also builds on the exhaustive work we’ve been doing with the ecosystem over the past decade to ensure a choice of fully optimized, easy-to-deploy solutions in the marketplace. We are working closely with our Builders ecosystem to create a wide range of workload-optimized solutions that will take full advantage of the new capabilities and performance of the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family.

We believe the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family – which is already being embraced by a wide range of cloud providers and leading enterprises around the world – will be a catalyst for organizations to modernize their data centers, offering much greater flexibility and choice in how data center technologies are adopted and deployed, and reducing complexity and test and validation overhead.

We look forward to sharing more details about when we launch the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family this summer.