Intel has gone the simpler route, renaming the Xeon Scalable family branding as “Xeon 6” for their Sierra Forest & Granite Rapids CPUs. Xeon Scalable Family is the current branding for Intel’s data center and enterprise chips. However, as soon as its 6th-gen processors debut, Intel will be moving towards a much simpler nomenclature.
The All New Intel Xeon 6
The new Intel Xeon 6 processors do the heavy lifting on our current 6th GenAI solutions, such as RAG, that use proprietary data to produce business outcomes customized for business. These next-generation processors cater to data centers, cloud, and edge computing environments. The Intel Xeon 6 lineup will feature efficient cores (E-cores) for optimized efficiency, debuting this quarter, followed by performance cores (P-cores) to enhance AI performance, which will launch shortly after the E-core processors.
Under the new naming scheme, starting with the 6th Gen Xeon processors, all products will be labeled simply as “Xeon 6.” The first chip families to use this branding are the E-Core-only Sierra Forest chips, which are expected to include up to 288 Sierra Glen cores, and the P-Core-only Granite Rapids chips, which are anticipated to include up to 3 compute dies using the Redwood Cove core architecture. These chips were initially set to use the 6th Gen Xeon Scalable family nomenclature.
The Intel Xeon 6 processors with E-cores, known as “Sierra Forest,” provide a fourfold improvement in performance per watt and a 2.7-fold increase in rack density compared to 2nd Gen Intel Xeon processors. As a result, customers can retire older systems at a ratio of almost 3-to-1, reducing energy use and aligning with sustainability goals. Meanwhile, the Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores (Granite Rapids) introduce software support for the MXFP4 data format, reducing next token latency by up to 6.5x compared to 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors using FP16, enabling the execution of 70 billion parameter Llama-2 models.
Intel also provided additional performance metrics, demonstrating up to a 2.4x improvement in performance per watt and a 2.7x improvement in performance per rack. The Sierra Forest chips are slated to be available in Q2 2024, with the Intel Granite Rapids P-Core-only CPUs expected to follow later in the year.
