A few months ago, we covered the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable with vRAN Boost codenamed Xeon EE. Something we did not have at the time, but have now, is the Xeon EE SKU list and there are some really interesting parts of the list. Let us dive into the new parts.
Intel Xeon EE with vRAN Boost SKU List
As a quick background, the Intel Xeon EE series is designed for 5G operators with vRAN Boost accelerators. The idea was to give Xeon CPUs better performance per watt with the acceleration technology.
We got the SKU list and found something really neat. There are two dies used for the Intel Xeon Gold chips with 3N and 3NE as their last two or three characters. First, we can see that there is only the option to have a single vRAN Boost Device onboard, but that makes sense given how Intel has shown other accelerators. These chips are all in the 145-205W TDP range with single socket scalability.
Only the 20-core AMX SKU has Intel AMX, which is intriguing since Intel is all about AMX and AI these days. The 20-core CPUs are also the only parts that are based on the EE LCC die with only 48 lanes of PCIe support. The other parts are based on the EE MCC die have 64 PCIe lanes. It seems as though the EE dies are distinct from the standard MCC and XCC dies that we are accustomed to with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids series.
Final Words
For those in the 5G infrastructure market, likely, they have already heard of Xeon EE. Intel’s strategy is to put acceleration on the CPU while AMD is still focused on PCIe-attached acceleration with the AMD EPYC 8004 Siena series. To be fair, Intel has a more targeted product with the EPYC 8004 series has a much broader scope.
We just wanted to show folks the SKUs available for the Intel Xeon EE series since we had not done so already and there are some interesting tidbits here.
