6 Big Announcements From Intel Architecture Day 2020

From multiple discrete GPUs shipping within the next year to a historical intranode enhancement for Tiger Lake, the semiconductor giant made several new disclosures to show that it is investing in next-generation design methodologies to help it overcome manufacturing issues.

​ Intel Provides More Details For Ice Lake, Sapphire Rapids Server CPUs

With Intel set to begin making initial shipments of its Ice Lake server processors by the end of the year, the company provided more details on the next-generation Xeon chips as well as its successor, Sapphire Rapids, which is set to begin shipping for production in the second half of 2021.

The company said Ice Lake, which will be its first 10nm server processor line, will bring a significant improvement in performance for both throughput and responsiveness for “all workloads.” The processors will include total memory encryption, a new instruction set for accelerating crypto processing as well as support for PCIe 4.0 and eight memory channels. The company is also planning Xeon D variants for network and storage as well as IoT variants for the Ice Lake lineup.

As for Sapphire Rapids, Intel said the next-generation Xeon Scalable line will use an enhanced version of its SuperFin technology that is being introduced with its forthcoming Tiger Lake mobile processors. The processors will support Compute Express Link 1.1, DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0 and new built-in acceleration for artificial intelligence called Advanced Matrix Extensions.

“We have the silicon in our labs and are excited about sampling it to customers soon,” said Sailesh Kottapalli, an Intel Senior Fellow in the Intel Architecture, Graphics and Software Group and chief architect for data center processor architecture.