Cisco UCS M6 Series Adds 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Ice Lake Support

Cisco UCS has been around for some time and as one would expect, Cisco’s server line has been updated with the new Intel Xeon Ice Lake processors. The new generation offers perhaps the largest generational upgrade in technology since 2012 and the Intel Xeon E5-2600 V1 series.

Cisco UCS C220 M6, UCS C240 M6, and UCS B200 M6 Servers

Cisco has three models it is upgrading with Ice Lake Xeon. First, we are going to cover the UCS B200 M6, then the C240 M6, and finally the C220 M6. This order was decided by the cover image we made above which is the opposite of the AMD EPYC 7003 Cisco UCS launch cover.

Cisco UCS B200 M6

The blade offering is the Cisco UCS B200 M6. This is a dual-socket node that can support 40 core Xeon CPUs which is impressive from a cooling perspective.

Here are the key specs:

• 1-2 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (with up to 40 cores per socket)
• 32 DIMM slots (16 DIMMs per CPU socket), 3200 MHz DDR4 or 16x DDR4 + 16x Optane PMem 200
• Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1440 modular LAN on Motherboard (mLOM)
• One rear slot for VIC (Cisco UCS VIC 1480 or port expander)
• One front dedicated slot for a Cisco FlexStorage RAID controller, Cisco FlexStorage passthrough, or Cisco M.2 RAID controller
• Up to two SAS/SATA/NVMe disk drives or up to four M.2 drives

Overall, this is a fairly standard blade offering for Cisco, but it has the impact of increasing core counts and memory significantly.

Cisco UCS C240 M6

The Cisco USC C240 M6 is the company’s 2U offering. As such, it has a much higher degree of expansion capabilities.

Key specs include:

• 1-2 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (with up to 40 cores per socket)
• 32 DIMM slots (16 DIMMs per CPU socket), 3200 MHz DDR4 or 16x DDR4 + 16x Optane PMem 200
• Up to eight PCIe Gen4 slots plus modular LAN on Motherboard (mLOM) slot and support for up to five GPUs
• Support for Cisco UCS VIC 1400 Series adapters as well as third-party options
• Up to 28 SAS/SATA/NVMe disk drives
• RAID and M.2 boot options available

Overall, this is a fairly standard 2U offering in the industry.

Cisco UCS C220 M6

For higher density applications than the C240 M6 2U system offers, Cisco has its 1U offering.

Here are the key specs of the Cisco UCS C220 M6:

• 1-2 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (with up to 40 cores per socket)
• 32 DIMM slots (16 DIMMs per CPU socket), 3200 MHz DDR4 or 16x DDR4 + 16x Optane PMem 200
• Up to three PCIe Gen4 slots plus modular LAN on Motherboard (mLOM) slot and support for up to two GPUs
• Support for Cisco UCS VIC 1400 Series adapters as well as third-party options
• Up to 10 SAS/SATA/NVMe disk drives
• RAID and M.2 boot options available

Here one can see that the impact of moving to the 1U form factor is that we lose support for five PCIe slots and three GPUs, we also can only get up to 10x 2.5″ drives instead of up to 28x on the 2U offering.

Final Words

Cisco has fewer server offerings than many of its competitors. Dell EMC, for example, has blade servers but also a wide range of rack servers. Supermicro has over 100 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable designs. Still, it is good to see that Cisco is updating UCS and it now has a relatively close parity between its Intel Ice Lake and AMD EPYC 7003 “Milan” designs in the Cisco UCS M6 series.

You can learn more about the new platform from Intel in our Intel Xeon Ice Lake Edition Marks the Start and End of an Era article and the accompanying video here: