Intel Goes For 48-Cores: Cascade-AP with Multi-Chip Package Coming Soon

[harlan4096]

Ahead of the annual Supercomputing 2018 conference next week, Intel is today announcing part of its upcoming Cascade Lake strategy. Following on from its server-focused Xeon Scalable Skylake family, Intel has already pre-announced that Cascade Lake-SP will form the next generation, with a focus on compute and security. Today’s announcement is for a product family to run alongside Cascade Lake-SP, called Cascade Lake-AP, or Cascade-AP for short. Cascade-AP is going to be aimed at ‘advanced performance’. In order to implement this new processor family, Intel is combining multiple chips in the same package.

Scaling up to 48-Cores Per CPU

Intel is still keeping a lot of details for Cascade-AP under wraps for now, but what we do know is some high level specifications: Cascade-AP processors will be up to 48 cores, possibly with hyperthreading, and is aimed at dual socket servers, for a total of 96 cores in a 2S system. As a result, a single Cascade-AP is essentially a 2S Xeon setup on a single chip.

Each Cascade-AP processor will have 12 DDR4 DRAM channels, although maximum capacity of memory has not been announced. Connection between the processors will be the standard UPI connection as seen on current Xeon Scalable processors, although connection speed was not specified. It would appear that Cascade-AP is not designed to scale beyond a 2S system.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13535/int...cascade-ap