Today, Intel showed off its roadmap for its storage and memory portfolio, primarily the Optane lineup. While there was a lot of info there for Server and Data Center products, I won’t bother with that as it’s already been covered by most outlets.
One interesting slide that was flashed in between was with respect to the future Xeon Scalable processors, namely Ice Lake-SP and Sapphire Rapids
While Intel has been promising Sapphire Rapids by the end of 2021, the above slide indicates that these processors will launch in 2022. It’s likely that similar to the Ice Lake-SP launch, the chips will be shipped to select clients by the end of 2021 with the actual launch happening in 2022.
Regardless, this means Intel will have to rely on Ice Lake to combat AMD’s Milan chips for the entire year. Thanks to the IPC gain with Zen 3 and the higher clock speeds, the next-gen Epyc chips are expected to be notably faster than their preceding Rome counterparts.
Ice Lake-SP is supposed to top out at 32 cores, with a possible AP variant featuring a dual-die design with up to 64 cores, the same as Rome and Milan. Ice Lake will be the first server lineup to support AVX512 and will be one of Intel’s main marketing points against AMD’s new parts.
