Intel Corp. today unveiled its 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors, the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, that promise a leap in data center performance and efficiency.

The processors offer enhanced security and new capabilities for artificial intelligence, the cloud, the network and edge, and the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Intel designed the new 4th Gen Xeon by working alongside partners to deliver differentiated solutions and systems at scale to tackle their biggest computing challenges.

The new releases, Intel says, offer workload-first acceleration and highly optimized software tuned for specific workloads, enabling users to deliver the right performance at the right power for an optimal overall total cost of ownership. In addition, the 4th Gen Xeon processors offer customers a range of features for managing power and performance, delivering the optimal use of CPU resources to help achieve their sustainability goals.

“The launch of 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors and the Max Series product family is a pivotal moment in fueling Intel’s turnaround, reigniting our path to leadership in the data center and growing our footprint in new arenas,” Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and AI Group, said in a statement. “Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon and the Max Series product family deliver what customers truly want – leadership performance and reliability within a secure environment for their real-world requirements – driving faster time to value and powering their pace of innovation.”

The 4th Gen Xeon family expands on Intel’s purpose-built, workload-first strategy and approach by offering leading performance and sustainability. Key features include the processors offering the most built-in accelerators of any CPU in the world to tackle customers’ most important computing challenges across AI, analytics, networking, security, storage and high-performance computing.

Compared to previous generations of Intel Xeon processes, the 4th Gen delivers a 2.9x¹ average performance per watt efficiency improvement for targeted workloads when utilizing built-in accelerators. Customers also gain up to 70-watt² power savings per CPU in optimized power mode with minimal performance loss.

As sustainability becomes increasingly important for data centers, the 4th Gen Xeons offer additional power savings. The new Optimized Power Mode can deliver up to 20% socket savings with less than 5% performance impact for selected workloads. New air and liquid cooling innovations also reduce total data center energy consumption.

For AI, 4th Gen Xeon processors achieve higher PyTorch real-time inference and training performance with built-in Intel Advanced Matrix Extension accelerators. The processes are said to unlock new levels of performance for inference and training across a wide breadth of AI workloads.

Performance

4th Gen Xeon and the Intel Max Series product family offer a scalable, balanced architecture that integrates CPU and GPU with oneAPI’s open software ecosystem for demanding computing workloads in HPC and AI, according to the company.

The Xeon CPU Max Series is said by Intel to be the first and only x86-based processor with high bandwidth memory, accelerating many HPC workloads without needing code changes. The Intel Data Center GPU Max Series is Intel’s highest-density processor and will be available in several form factors that address different customer needs.

The Xeon CPU Max Series offers 64 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory (HBM2e), significantly increasing data throughput for HPC and AI workloads. Compared with top-end 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Xeon CPU Max Series provides up to 3.7 times¹º more performance on a range of real-world applications like energy and earth systems modeling.

The Data Center GPU Max Series offers over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package, delivering new levels of throughput to challenging workloads like physics, financial services and life sciences. When paired with the Xeon CPU Max Series, the combined platform achieves up to 12.8 times¹³ greater performance than the prior generation when running the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator.

Security

At the foundation of the new range is security. Intel claims that the 4th Gen Xeon range delivers the most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio of any data center silicon provider in the industry, enhancing data security, regulatory compliance and data sovereignty.

In addition to the existing Intel Software Guard Extensions, the range also provides new virtual-machine isolation technology – Intel Trust Domain Extensions that allows users to port existing applications into a confidential environment and will debut with Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud.

Images: Intel