Granite Rapids doesn’t seem like a breakthrough with partners yet, but Sierra Forest’s reception is surprisingly favorable.
Back in the spring, we wrote about the Xeon series changing its labeling scheme, and in the framework of this, Intel will launch the Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest platforms this year. The company expects a lot from both developments, but the Granite Rapids option, which hides P-cores, does not really attract interested parties for the time being, as it only offers a lot, specifically 128 cores, with a very massive consumption surplus. According to the preliminary data, there are no real problems with its performance, but its significant speed advantage compared to the current Emerald Rapids design is largely due to its approximately double consumption, which not everyone is a fan of in terms of energy efficiency.
Surprisingly, there is much more interest in Sierra Forest, and this is what Intel is pushing for in its presentations, because the partners have spectacularly clicked on this platform. This system can offer a maximum of 288 Sierra Glen code-named E-cores on one package, resulting in a total of 288 hardware threads. Although the performance of the Sierra Glen core is well below the Redwood Cove core used by Granite Rapids, its energy efficiency is very good, so it can play a big role in data centers. In addition, due to the large number of physical resources, a large number of virtual machines can be run on one enclosure.
It is interesting that Intel previously thought that there would be less interest in Sierra Forest, but at the same time, the demands have spectacularly contradicted the expectations of the giant company from Santa Clara, and the partners are much more interested in the system stuffed with E-cores than the high-performance Xeon expenditure. Of course, it is a big question how much of a role the significant consumption, jumping above 500 watts, or the competitive AMD EPYC designs, for which the company has not found an antidote in recent years, plays a role in this.
The evolution of market demands looks like the development priorities have also been changed, because the successor to Sierra Forest, codenamed Clearwater Forest, will arrive in record time, as early as next year. Most manufacturers are already paying attention to this, and this in principle deploys Foveros Direct 3D encapsulation, so that the CPU chips are physically placed on a chip consisting of non-scalable circuits. In this respect, the Clearwater Forest platform processor will be more technologically advanced than any previous Xeon. All this indicates how much Intel adapts to the needs, so if partners are more interested in designs using E-cores, then that will be the priority, and the P-core version will receive less focus.
Source: prohardver.hu
