5th Gen Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids SKUs
Intel showed a lot of restraint when it came to the SKU list. There are only around 32 new SKUs. In a nod to competitive pressures, pricing is much more constrained than in Sapphire Rapids as well. Then again, the extremely high Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H list pricing was for 4-way and 8-way systems, and from what we understand, 60-core parts were not the sweet spot from a manufacturing standpoint. Many in the industry use 56 cores as the reference number when they think of the maximum common core count SKUs.
Something that is easily notable here is that Intel is using cache size as a differentiator. For example, the Intel Xeon Gold 6538Y+ and Gold 6530 are both mainstream-priced server CPUs at 32 cores. The Gold 6530 has 100MB of L3 cache, or around 3MB L3 cache/ core more, but fewer accelerators. Intel is also going very light on its accelerators, even though it features these accelerators prominently in benchmarking. It also cannot really be said that this is a DDR5-5600 line. Less than 22% of SKUs, and not even all of the Xeon Platinum SKUs utilize DDR5-5600. There are also no SKUs with DDR5-5600 and a full set of accelerators active, which is a bit wild.
Dear Intel. Please stop this. Make them all DDR5-5600 and let people use lower cost and speed memory if they want. Folks rocking a $415 Xeon Bronze 3508U or a $568 Xeon Silver 4510 are unlikely to pay the premium for DDR5-5600 memory anyway. Those SKUs are just two of the SKUs that are limited to only DDR5-4400 speeds, so they would be overbuying even at DDR5-4800. This is silly. AMD has SKUs with different cores, extra cache, and more, and is not creating 32 SKUs to describe a core count range within 56 cores.
A huge number of Xeon sales go to hyper-scalers with custom SKUs, but there are now several suffix options.
It is a bit interesting Intel did not go to 385W on all of its high-end parts. That was the spec for this generation of Intel platform and we asked in 2022 why this was not going to be the Xeon MAX TDP limit.
Next, let us get to the performance of the new chips.
