Intel Outs First Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" Benchmarks, On-package Accelerators Help Catch Up with AMD EPYC

Intel in the second day of its InnovatiON event, turned attention to its next-generation Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server processors, and demonstrated on-package accelerators. These are fixed-function hardware components that accelerate specific kinds of popular server workloads (i.e. run them faster than a CPU core can). With these, Intel hopes to close the CPU core-count gap it has with AMD EPYC, with the upcoming "Zen 4" EPYC chips expected to launch with up to 96 cores per socket in its conventional variant, and up to 128 cores per socket in its cloud-optimized variant.

Intel’s on-package accelerators include AMX (advanced matrix extensions), which accelerate recommendation-engines, natural language processing (NLP), image-recognition, etc; DLB (dynamic load-balancing), which accelerates security-gateway and load-balancing; DSA (data-streaming accelerator), which speeds up the network stack, guest OS, and migration; IAA (in-memory analysis accelerator), which speeds up big-data (Apache Hadoop), IMDB, and warehousing applications; a feature-rich implementation of the AVX-512 instruction-set for a plethora of content-creation and scientific applications; and lastly, the QAT (QuickAssist Technology), with speed-ups for data compression, OpenSSL, nginx, IPsec, etc. Unlike "Ice Lake-SP," QAT is now implemented on the processor package instead of the PCH.