Intel’s 5th Gen Emerald Rapids Xeon Scalable Family To Feature Up To 64 Cores & SKUs Ranging From 125-350W TDPs
According to the leak, Intel’s Emerald Rapids-SP Xeon CPU family will be based upon a mature ‘Intel 7’ node. You can think of it as a 2nd Gen ‘Intel 7’ node which would lead to slightly higher efficiency. Emerald Rapids is expected to make use of the Raptor Cove core architecture which is an optimized variant of the Golden Cove core that will deliver 5-10% IPC improvement over Golden Cove cores. It will also pack up to 64 cores and 128 threads which is a small core bump over the 56 cores and 112 threads featured on Sapphire Rapids chips. This will more or less match the existing EPYC Milan & Rome core counts but Genoa and Bergamo will be offering up to 50% & 2x core/thread count increase over Emerald Rapids and they will be available in full volume by 2023. So talking about the platform details, the Eagle Stream ecosystem will allow support for 125-350W TDP SKUs on the Socket E (LGA 4677), enabling drop-in support from Sapphire Rapids-SP. The HPC and data center segment will have immense scalability options ranging from 1S, 2S, 4S, 8S and even more sockets (via xNC support) for increased compute and core densities. The chips will come with the latest accelerators including:
Intel Data Streaming Accelerator Intel QuickAssist Technology Intel Dynamic Load Balancer Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator
Besides that, the platform will enable support for faster DDR5-5600 (1DPC) and retain DDR5-4800 (2DPC). The 8-channel DDR5 memory platform will allow up to two DIMMS per channel for a total of 16 DIMMs per socket and each socket can support up to 24 Gb DRAM densities. There’s also Crow Pass Persistent Memory support “Crystal Ridge 3.0” listed but with Optane canned, that no longer seems to be the case. There will be four UPI 2.0 links running at a higher width speed of x24 for up to 20 GT/s transfer rates. As far as PCIe lanes are concerned, the Intel Emerald Rapids Xeon CPUs will feature up to 80 Gen 5 PCIe lanes per CPU in addition to PCIe 4.0 lanes from the North Bridge. The platform will support bifurcation of x16, x8, x4, and x2 (Gen 4) and will also support Shared Virtual Memory & Scalable IO Virtualization. The Emmitsburg PCH will offer 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 1G Ethernet for Manageability, and an x8 DMI connection rated at PCIe 3.0 speeds. For security, the platform will offer:
Intel Trust Domain Extensions Intel SGX With Integrity TME-MK - 128 Keys Platform Firmware Resilience (PFR) with Peripheral Device Attestation Hardware Enforced Execution Controls Intel VT-Redirect Protection (Formerly HLAT) Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) VM Denial of Service Prevention
By the time Intel released Emerald Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs, AMD will already have released its Zen 4-powered EPYC Genoa & Bergamo chips so the Xeon lineup may end up being too little & too late with only Intel’s advanced instruction sets backing them up in niche workloads. A good thing for Emerald Rapids would be that it will remain compatible with the Eagle Stream platform (LGA 4677).