Intel Discontinues 68 Intel Xeon Platinum Gold Silver and Bronze Processors

Farewell to a huge number of Intel processors. Intel said it is discontinuing almost 70 SKUs of its 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable “Cascade Lake” processors in a recent PCN. The SKUs cover from low-end Intel Xeon Bronze 3204 to high-end Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. If you still are looking for mainstream PCIe Gen3 server CPUs (we are going to forget Cooper Lake for a moment), then you are going to have to get your final demand forecasts and orders ready.

Intel Discontinues 68 Intel Xeon Platinum Gold Silver and Bronze Processors

Putting the CPUs being discontinued into buckets we have:

• 2 Intel Xeon Bronze 3200
• 2 Intel Xeon Silver 4200
• 10 Intel Xeon Gold 5200 (aka Xeon Pyrite)
• 24 Intel Xeon Gold 6200
• 14 Intel Xeon Platinum 8200
• 16 Assorted Boxed CPU SKUs

That gives us a total of 68 processor SKUs spanning all the way to the Intel Xeon Gold 6258R as part of the Ice Lake delay’s Big 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh parts.

Here is the second table:

That is a lot of processors.

Final Words

Of course, since the LGA3647 platform was very popular, these processors are not going away overnight. Instead, Intel says its demand forecasts are due 2024-01-05. In October 2024 there will be the final order dates. April 2025 is the last shipment date.

Let us take a moment and put this into some perspective. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Ice Lake Edition launched in Q2 2021 with a maximum of 28 cores. By Q2, 2024 we will have 288 core CPUs. We have not experienced a >10x in maximum core counts in ~3 years in the server industry. Those 28 core CPUs were also top-bin parts at the time. It is crazy to think that if you bought the top bin Xeon Platinum 8280 or Xeon Gold 6258R on April 1, 2021 a CPU would be out within 40 months that would be 10x.

Then again, in 2017 when Skylake launched it was unfathomable that on April 1, 2021 it would still effectively be top of the line. Cascade Lake was a relatively small upgrade over Skylake which really stalled the market while AMD pushed ahead with Rome.

Retiring CPUs is common, and there will be longer lifecycle parts in the market. Still, this is retiring an era at Intel.