Real Tech with WEI - Intel Scalable Processors EXTENDED CUT

Chris Lessard:

Welcome to Real Tech with WEI. I'm Chris Lessard, director of business development. And today we have Dave Fafel, our chief architect, and today's topic, Intel's new scalable family processor. So Dave, Intel's released a new family of processors with a lot of great features. Talk about some of those.

Dave Fafel:

Sure. Intel has released the Intel scalable family processors. This family processors comes with increased core counts, increased frequency on the high end CPUs, new memory features. And Intel is advertising a almost 2x performance increase for general data center use, even a 4x performance gain in virtualized environments. So there's a lot of new features that come along with these processors and a lot of reasons to take a close look at them.

Chris Lessard:

So if I was on the older architecture with my server, what does that mean moving forward?

Dave Fafel:

Well, Intel uses a tick-tock cycle for their CPUs. So this family of processors is on the leading edge of that cycle. As` matter of fact, they're on a new platform code name, the pearly platform. And these processors are codenamed the Skylake processors. So they're on the technically, the tock cycle of their tick-tock architecture, meaning for them, this is the first CPU generation within that platform. And what this means is that every server manufacturer is going to release or has released new server models to support this processor. The way that Intel works generally is that on the tick-tock cycle, both of those CPUs are typically supported on the same server model. So the next release from Intel will likely work on the generation of servers that are being released with this new platform.

Chris Lessard:

So Dave, lot of new specs in this architecture release. Can you talk about some of those in detail?

Dave Fafel:

Yeah, absolutely. So this family of processors comes with an increased core count up to 28 cores on the higher end CPUs up to 3.7 Gigahertz of processor frequency and new memory architecture for improved performance. The previous generation of Intel CPUs offered a four channel memory controller and the new Intel scalable processors offer a six channel memory controller, which means that we can have up to 12 dims per CPU. And when we configure memory now we want to configure that according to the number of channels that we have. So in the past we would configure a memory in multiples of four. All right, so 4, 8, 16, 32, et cetera. And that is a has been a very common way to configure memory in a system. What we want to do now is change that a little bit. So when we configure in multiples of six our overall capacity changes a bit. 48, 96, 192 gig are going to be the optimum performing configurations for servers moving forward due to the new architecture.

Chris Lessard:

Intel has really stepped it up. What are some of the things that customers need to know moving forward?

Dave Fafel:

Well, there's a few things. One, the naming naming nomenclature and model numbers have changed on this family of processors. The processor family now is in different levels such as bronze, silver, gold and platinum. And each of those levels offer different performance characteristics per CPU. So we want to understand where customers are and what CPUs they're using today and where we can transition them to. It's not necessarily a direct transition. So if you're using a hex core CPU today, you're not necessarily going to move to a hex core CPU tomorrow because the performance increase on the CPS is pretty dramatic. What we want to be able to understand is what are the characteristics of your application environment today and can we help you to get the same or better performance at a lower cost by finding the right CPU for your environment.

So we want to understand where in that class of CPUs you want to fall. So gone are the B3, B4 the version designates for the previous generation. And now we're using model numbers 3100, 4100, and 6100. I think 8100. And really in that family, that one in the 4100 is actually their new generational designate. So the next release of processors will be the 4200 for instance. And that way we'll know what generation in that tick-tock cycle they're in. 

Another thing to consider is that the higher end CPUs in the family offer additional features such as increased memory performance, higher core count and so forth. So we want to understand that if you're looking for all of the higher end features that we're picking the right processor. And lastly we want to make sure that again, our memory configurations are optimized for performance because of the new memory architecture is very important to not configure the memory on these systems the way that we always have. To configure them properly and deliver optimum performance requires some understanding of how the architecture works and that's what we deliver.

Chris Lessard:

It sounds like a lot of great performance improvements. What can customers do to engage us to take advantage of these?

Dave Fafel:

Well, absolutely. You know, every server manufacturer's coming out with new models and new generations for their servers and we can help our customers to configure an architect, these new platforms efficiently and cost-effectively for them. So reach out to us and we'll help you to design the right server configuration for you on just about every platform available out in the market today.

Chris Lessard:

Well, that wraps it up. Thank you for joining us on Real Tech with WEI.