Intel’s Cooper Lake server products will not be released as widely as first imagined
Intel’s Cooper Lake server products will not be released as widely as first imagined
Well, now it’s 2020 and Cooper Lake is nowhere to be found, and some reports have claimed that Intel has practically killed off the series, which is somewhat true.Â
Cooper Lake is still due to release in the first half of 2020, delivering 56 cores per socket and BFLOAT16 (AVX512_BF16) acceleration, but its release will not be as widespread as first expected. Intel claims that they have decided to “to narrow the delivery of our Cooper Lake products that best meets our market demand”, but the reality is that Cooper Lake will only be useful for a minority of Intel’s customers.
When speaking to Serve The Home, Intel released the following information;Â Â
- – Intel constantly evaluates our product roadmaps to ensure we are positioned to deliver the best silicon portfolio for data center platforms.
- – Given the continued success of our recent expansion of 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable products, in addition to customer demand for our upcoming 10nm Ice Lake processors, we have decided to narrow the delivery of our Cooper Lake products that best meets our market demand.
- – Intel’s upcoming Cooper Lake processors will be supported on the Cedar Island platform, which supports standard and custom configurations that scale up to 8 sockets.
- – We continue to expect delivery of Cooper Lake starting in the first half of 2020.
- – Customers, including some of the largest AI innovators today, are uniquely interested in Cooper Lake’s enhanced DL Boost technology including the industry’s first inclusion of bfloat16 instruction processing support. We expect strong demand for the technology and processing capability with certain customer segments and AI usages in the marketplace that support deep learning for training and inference use cases.
- – Intel’s upcoming 10nm Ice Lake processors will be introduced on the upcoming Whitley platform.
- – Intel remains on track for delivery of 10nm Ice Lake CPUs later this year.
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Given this information, we now know that Intel’s Cooper Lake series of processors will be limited to quad-socket and eight-socket servers, removing Cooper Lake from Intel’s lower-end server offerings. Intel’s “Cedar Island platform” does not extend down to dual-socket and single-socket systems, severely limiting Cooper Lake’s potential userbase.Â
Most servers utilise single-socket or dual-socket processors, making Cooper Lake useless for a large portion of the CPU market. That said, Cooper Lake is focusing on an area where Intel is dominant, as AMD doesn’t currently offer support for more than two sockets with its EPYC series processors. Support for BFLOAT16 instructions will also prove popular for specific customers.Â
Another factor that’s worth considering is that Intel’s Ice Lake Xeons are due to release in late 2020, a factor which gives Cooper Lake little time to be adopted by Intel’s customers, especially when Ice Lake-powered Xeons are on the horizon.Â
(Image via Serve The Home)
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So is Cooper Lake dead? No, but Cooper Lake will a much smaller part of Intel’s CPU lineup than first anticipated. While this isn’t the end of the world for Intel, this does act as yet another example of where the company hasn’t met its release targets or platform commitments. This has no doubt made Intel appear unreliable to OEMs/ODMs.Â
Intel now needs its Ice Lake Xeons to release on time, and with their late 2020 release target, the company will need to compete with AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, not just today’s Zen 2 silicon. This will place Intel in an uncomfortable situation, unless Ice Lake turns out to deliver incredible performance and efficiency gains.Â
You can join the discussion and Intel’s Cooper Lake lack of single-socket and dual-socket support on the OC3D Forums.Â