At Intel Innovation 2023 in San Jose the company showed off its new Xeon CPUs. The new CPUs are set to launch in late 2023 and are a refresh to the current generation 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids chips. The new chips will be socket-compatible with the current batch of servers and Intel said it will launch on December 14, 2023.
We are doing this live at Innovation, so please excuse typos.
5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids at Intel Innovation 2023
Intel says that the new generation of processors will be its last in the current sockets before moving to the much larger Birch Stream platform that will take Granite Rapids (P-core 2024), Sierra Forest (E-core 2024), and Clearwater Forest (E-core 2025.)
This is the generation where we expect Intel to hit 64 cores and we also expect improvements to DDR5 memory speeds.
Final Words
Of course, we will be bringing you more on Emerald Rapids later this year.
Just as an aside, Intel is moving. Emerald Rapids is launching less than a year after Sapphire Rapids. At the same time, Intel is moving to the 288 E-Core Sierra Forest in 2024 and Granite Rapids in 2024. The big question is what that will mean for Emerald Rapids. Will customers who are looking for high-core count parts adopt a 64-core Emerald Rapids rather than waiting for a 288-core Sierra Forest? Sapphire Rapids was a big deal, but it is going to be state-of-the-art for only around 11 months.
Still, perhaps it is better to have the current challenge of having fast innovation than what happened with Ice Lake Xeons and the massive delays with 10nm. Perhaps that is a big part of the current messaging. Intel is progressing with its process technology at the same time it is pushing packaging technology to build larger chips. It will be good to see Intel get more competitive in 2024, but some folks will not be able to make the jump to Birch Stream, so for those folks, Emerald Rapids may be exciting.
