5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Overview at Intel Innovation 2023

At Intel Innovation 2023, the company showed off Emerald Rapids. Given that we are so close to launch on December 14 and it is a drop-in, with BIOS update, to existing platforms, there are a large number of the systems on the show floor. What Intel has not done to date is clearly show off many of the new features of the new chip. Now, we have them.

5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Overview at Intel Innovation 2023

Let us get to the Emerald Rapids slide. First, we get a larger L3 cache as well as increased DDR5 speed. We also get up to 64 cores in SKUs like the Intel Xeon 8592+. Intel says it will finally support CXL Type 3 devices. CXL Type 3 devices work (well) on Sapphire Rapids but are not officially supported. There are also enhanced accelerators.

Intel says these are more efficient CPUs and will be leaning into Xeon AI acceleration. At the same time, Intel will be pushing security features like Intel TDX or Trust Domain Extensions in this and future generations.

One of the other fun ones is that we see that Intel is supporting Intel Virtual RAID on CPU or VROC. Earlier in 2023 Intel did a 360 on discontinuing VROC so that was a good one to see.

Final Words

Overall, we get lots of new disclosures with the new parts and significantly more than we saw in the Intel keynote. We will, of course, have more on Emerald Rapids later on December 14 when the parts launch. The servers we are reviewing today with Sapphire Rapids 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable and Xeon MAX CPUs will be available with Emerald Rapids CPUs.

There are two ways to look at Emerald Rapids. On one hand, it is the last CPU in Intel’s 2023 platform with relatively smaller updates than we will see in Intel’s 2024 platform. On the other hand, this is a fairly notable update for a refresh coming around 11 months after the Sapphire Rapids launch.