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March 23, 2023

Issue #165

Intel Launches Sapphire
Rapids Xeon, Benefiting High-Performance CAD Workstations, Part 1  

Herrera on Hardware: New high-end Xeon yields a long-awaited refresh of its high-end Xeon W CPUs for high-performance CAD workstations. Not just any workstation is capable of housing this level of performance — witness HP’s new Z8 Fury, demonstrating what can be achieved when compromising on size, power, and price.

It’s been a while. Actually, a while is a bit of an understatement, because in the context of the typical rapid-fire product cycles for CPUs, it’s been more like an eternity. For years, Intel had long maintained those product cycles like a metronome, regular and precise in delivery of new processors and platforms, so much so they even had a name for their planning and scheduling of new generations: Tick-Tock. But in the case of its premier CPU line Xeon, recent delays have meant that until this month, major OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo hadn’t been able to upgrade processor options for their Premium single-socket (1S, with Xeon W) workstations nor their dual-socket models (2S, with Xeon Scalable) for three full years. Finally, the wait is over, as Intel this month, March 2023, unveiled the anticipated Sapphire Rapids generation of Xeon for workstations, split into two lines: the Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 lines.

The delay had meant the upper end of the fixed workstation market, historically and virtually 100% based on Xeon, lost its luster in the very criterion upon which the segment is primarily judged: performance. Worse, since Intel’s Core brand was still pumping out new generations of processors over the same period (11^th Generation Rocket Lake, 12^th Generation Alder Lake, and most recently 13^th Generation Raptor Lake), more economical Core-based Entry class workstations were outperforming some Premium 1S models, based on Xeon W, and making the vaunted 2S models, based on Xeon Scalable, less impressive by comparison. The combination of factors cut in half the market share of Xeon’s primary domain — the combined Premium 1S and 2S segments — since the start of 2019, down from nearly 50% of all fixed workstation units sold to just 25%. Clearly, Xeon workstations were no longer delivering premium performance, making the eventual appearance of Sapphire Rapids critical to reinforce the upper tiers of the fixed workstation market.

Fixed workstation market segmentation Image source: Jon Peddie Research. Click image to enlarge.

(Worth noting for those who’ve paid close attention to Intel’s Xeon W line: there was a 2021 release of the W-3300 Ice Lake generation, intended to be the successor to 2019’s W-2200, but for several reasons it was a non-starter in the market, at least for major workstation vendors like Dell, HP, and Lenovo.)

All about Performance, Sapphire Rapids Sensibly Spurns the Hybrid Design of Mainstream CPUs

First manifested in its 12^th Generation Core (code-named Alder Lake), Intel’s reworked hybrid approach to CPU design leverages one common foundation of two fundamental core types: the P-Core and the E-Core. The P-Core pushes forward on maximizing performance, trimming power where possible, but without sacrificing throughput. The other, the E-Core, prioritizes computational efficiency, trading off some performance to minimize power consumption. In this first duo of E-Core and P-Core microarchitectures, the latter is called Golden Cove, introduced with 12^th Generation Core and now appearing in Xeon W.

With this approach, Intel can produce a range of CPU parts, some with more E-Cores for lower demand applications where minimal power consumption is critical, like mobile devices, and some with more P-Cores for applications where performance more critical and power less so, as in line-powered fixed desktops and workstations. Leveraging this approach, Intel can design CPUs from applications with power budgets anywhere from 9 W to high-end desktop 125 W and more, built from the same two core flavors. Check out this previous column for a deeper look at Alder Lake and Intel’s new hybrid designs mixing P-Cores and E-Cores.

Targeting fixed workstations, the Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 lines slant priorities heavily in favor of performance, so much so in fact that they not only incorporate more P-Cores than E-cores, they don’t include E-Cores at all. And that’s the right call, as Xeon W is targeted for one thing only: maximum possible performance in single socket for a line-powered fixed workstation. There are plenty of great applications for E-Cores, but this isn’t one of them, so while Sapphire Rapids takes advantage of the Golden Cove P-Core, it’s no hybrid.

The core count is not the only criterion separating the W-3400 and W-2400 (and in fact the W5-3400 overlaps in count with the W7 and W9 W-2400 SKUs). While the latter supports four channels of memory and 56 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 I/O, the former doubles the bandwidth for both, with eight channels and 112 lanes. The bump for both makes sense to support the W-3400’s higher processing headroom.

A Credible Weapon to Fend Off the Challenge of AMD’s Threadripper PRO at the Upper End of the Market

For decades, the silicon industry (and Intel especially) has benefited from the long ride of Moore’s Law. Simply put, Moore’s Law stated that shrinking silicon dimensions would allow transistor counts to grow geometrically at roughly the same cost. It let a vendor count on a budget of twice as many transistors to gin up performance for the next generation. That progression proved incredibly fruitful, arguably the single most significant technological trend to influence progress across virtually every industry in the past fifty years. But while there is disagreement on if and when Moore’s Law ends (at least in the context of today’s silicon processes), few would deny it’s slowing. And that’s made it no longer feasible to simply count on twice the number of transistors to, say, double the core count of a high-performance CPU from one generation to the next.

Though not giving up on a Moore’s Law progression, Intel is as aware as any silicon vendor the need to search out new avenues to increase compute density beyond just stuffing more transistors on one silicon chip. Integrating more silicon die, or more common referred to as chiplets, into a single chip package accomplishes much of the same end-goal, and accordingly, every vendor of high-performance processors is adopting or at least considering chiplet approaches to maximize compute density per CPU socket.

CONTINUE READING. Read on to learn more about how Sapphire Rapids Xeon performs and how each workstation market leader is using the technology.
Read more >>

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