3rd Gen Intel Xeon Processors And 3D NAND SSDs Announced: What’s New?

Intel has officially unveiled a new generation of enterprise processors -- the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. These chipsets use artificial intelligence and are the first series of mainstream server processors to support bfloat16.

These processors are capable of AI inference and training more widely deployable on general-purpose CPUs for applications that include image classification, recommendation engines, speech recognition, and language modelling.

The new 3rd Gen Intel Scalable processors will be capable of supporting bfloat16 using Intel DL Boost technology. Bfloat16 is a compact numeric format that uses half the bits as today’s FP32 format but achieves comparable model accuracy with minimal software changes required. These CPUs will be available in Intel's four and eight-socket processor offering, capable of offering an average estimated gain of 1.9 times on popular workloads3 and up to 2.2 times more VMs4 compared with five-year-old four-socket platform equivalents.

AI and analytics are set to drive and create new opportunities in a broad range of industries, including finance, healthcare, industrial, telecom, and transportation. According to a report from IDC, by 2021 75 percent of commercial enterprise apps will use AI. The report also suggests that by 2025, a quarter of all the data generated will be created in real-time and this will create 95 percent volume growth in IoT products.

The company also showcased an upcoming technology called the Intel AI-optimized FPGA (Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs) with AI optimizations, capable of offering high-bandwidth, low-latency AI acceleration. These are flexible FPGAs, where customers can customize, reconfigure, and scale the AI-acceleration depending on the requirement.

Along with the new processors, the company also announced the new Intel Optane persistent memory with up to 4.5TB of storage per stick, capable of handling databases, dense virtualization, analytics, and high-powered computing.

Lastly, the company also announced the new Intel 3D NAND SSDs called the Intel SSD D7-P5500 and P5600. These storage units use Intel’s latest triple-level cell (TLC) 3D NAND technology along with a low-latency PCIe controller, making them efficient yet secure.