The Quiet Intel Xeon Cooper Lake Product Line Expansion

Originally launched with 11 public SKUs (excluding SKUs that are meant for hyper-scalers such as Facebook), the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable series has seen expansion that we wanted to cover. Specifically, that expansion covers the CPUs shown in this cover image. When the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable codenamed “Cooper Lake” launched in late Q2 2020, we noted that there may be room for quick expansion. We were frankly expecting follow-on parts. This is a line from page 2 of the original launch article:

“There are 11 SKUs being launched today. We expect Intel to plug some of the holes in this lineup with additional SKUs over the next few months.” (Source: STH)

It turns out, Intel followed on in Q3 2020 with several additional SKUs, and the Internet, including STH, largely missed the news.

Intel Xeon Cooper Lake Product Line Expansion

For our keying, we are going to use the same inverted text and background we used for “Refresh” parts, but these are probably more of product line expansion than refresh as we saw in the Big 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh Brings Competition Anew. Here are the four new parts. We are using the white text on black background labeling among the original eleven public parts:

Just putting the new SKUs in a slightly different perspective, here is what it looks like when we take the core count and thread count and multiply that by clock speed to give a rough performance metric.

Intel generally has a list pricing strategy that takes cores/ threads and clock speeds heavily into account. So we tend to look at these metrics to see how Intel is pricing its resources:

The three “newer” SKUs are the two Intel Xeon Platinum 8360H and 8360HL. The 24-core space is fairly popular for current-generation Intel SKUs. The Xeon Platinum name means these SKUs scale to 8-socket.

Continuing the 24-core theme, the Intel Xeon Gold 6330H is a lower-cost 24-core SKU. This is actually an important part since we get DDR4-2933 at a cost per core more similar to what the Xeon Gold 53xxH parts offer at only $79/ core. We also have lower clock speeds and TDP.

The fourth SKU we wanted to cover is the Intel Xeon Platinum 8356H. This is a very interesting SKU. It has a $425 / core cost with a list price of $3,400. The 8-core part is designed for applications where per-core licensing is a big deal. We get 3.9GHz as a base clock and 4.4GHz as the Turbo clock. This is a high per-core performance part. One item we noted is that in the Intel Ark specs this is a DDR4-2933 part, not a DDR4-3200 as we see in the other Intel Xeon Platinum parts.

Final Words

We knew this was coming, but it launched with so little fanfare in Q3 2020 that it did not get covered. The reason we circled back to the topic is the cover image which shows that high-performance 8-core SKU. This article is going to kick-off our 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable coverage series. We are starting with hands-on reviews and guides for Cooper Lake/ Cedar Island products.

We are also updating our original 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Cooper Lake SKU List and Value Analysis piece with these charts to keep that as a reference for the series. We took a hands-on look at the Supermicro SYS-240P-TNRT 4P 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Server already, and have some other items we will be looking at as we formally get into our coverage. In the meantime, it may be worth reading our 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Cooper Lake Launched for 4P and 8P piece to get more familiar with the platform.