Welcome back! What to expect from the new Intel Xeon 6900P

Hello! The mClouds team is in touch. While Intel not everything is smooth on the financial front and there are rumors about the sale of the company to the giant Qualcomm, the manufacturer is introducing a new processor to the market. They promise that the Intel Xeon 6900P will catch up and surpass its closest competitor – AMD EPYC Zen 5. Let's figure out whether the new product is really so good and what to expect from it.

New processor – for large-scale tasks

Increasing demand for artificial intelligence technologies is resulting in data centers requiring more powerful software and hardware. To meet these needs, Intel has developed a new line of server processors – the Intel Xeon 6900P. It is assumed that the sixth generation is optimal for use in resource-intensive environments, such as artificial intelligence clusters.

The company hopes that the Xeon 6900P series will be in demand in the AI ​​computing market due to two things:

1. Through the introduction of servers that use only the central processor for logical inference.

2. Due to the fact that the series will become the best choice for central processors in servers accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs, Gaudi 3 chips and the like.

All this should provide a sharp increase in performance compared to the previous generation of Intel and processors from other manufacturers.

Also manufacturer recommends use the processor in the following areas:

• mobile application development;

• cloud technologies;

• CRM, ERP;

• big data.

Key features of the Xeon 6900P line

Here are the key characteristics of the processor as stated by the manufacturer:

• support for DDR5 RAM at speeds up to 6400 MT/s;

• MRDIMM support at speeds up to 8800 MT/s;

• availability of up to 128 high-performance cores;

• availability of up to 96 lanes (PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0);

• L3 cache memory capacity up to 504 MB;

• Availability of hardware acceleration module Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions with support for FP16.

In the new line, Intel plans to release five processor variants. The flagship version, the Xeon 6980P, has 128 cores that operate at a base frequency of 2 GHz. For demanding workloads, they can increase this frequency to 3.9 GHz for short periods of time. The cores are supported by a 504MB L3 cache, where the chip stores data actively used by applications.

The series includes four other processors with less processing power. They have between 72 and 120 cores, which are tuned to higher base frequencies compared to the flagship Xeon 6980P.

Better than Gen5, but still a long way from AMD Zen 5

Naturally, the new generation of processors is superior to the previous, fifth. Thus, Intel notes that for a number of general computing workloads, data processing, HPC and artificial intelligence, the Xeon 6900P has 2.8 times higher performance, and efficiency has increased by an average of 60%. The company also says that with a typical server load of 40%, the Xeon 6900P's performance per watt can be up to 90% compared to the flagship version of the fifth-generation processor.

Here are the improvements Intel considers important to the new Xeon:

• 2 cores per socket;

• 1.2 times higher performance per core;

• 1.6 times higher average performance per watt;

• 30% lower cost of ownership for similar performance levels.

When developing a new line, Intel was guided by its closest competitor. In 2019, AMD took the lead with the Rome processor. This happened partly due to the transition to chip design, and also due to the fact that Intel slowed down the release of the 10nm processor.

Intel says the new series more productive and compared to fourth generation AMD EPYC processors. For example, judging by tests in the Llama 2 chatbot with 7 billion parameters, the 96-core Xeon 6972P is more than three times faster than the 96-core EPYC 9654.

Now let's compare the basic characteristics of the latest generations of both brands: Intel and AMD. In terms of numbers, Zen 5 is still in the lead, but in order to be convinced of the advantages of one or another crystal, they need to be tested.

Intel Xeon 6900P architecture

Now Intel's technological processes are improving and its chips can be comparable in performance to AMD. The architecture of the new processor is largely responsible for this.

The line uses Crestmont architecture – it is based on high-performance P-core cores. It has up to 8 sockets, supports multi-threaded computing and PCle 5.0. To expand the capabilities of working with artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Intel Xeon 6900P integrated technologies that have already proven themselves in previous generations of Intel and AMD processors:

• Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). The x86 extension allows you to speed up workloads that involve matrix operations, which are often used in AI and machine learning.

• Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). This extension for x86 speeds up processes associated with processing big data – useful for complex mathematical calculations and deployment of engineering applications.

Are there any disadvantages?

There was a fly in the ointment. To date, Intel has announced only part of the 6900P series – with the most sophisticated processors. Probably, such a step is the company’s desire to show that it can still fight and at least somehow keep the shares afloat.

The main disadvantage of the new processors is that they are very “hot”: four of the five presented crystals have a TDP of 500 W. This is a very high figure, which requires special nutritional conditions, and problems with cooling are also quite possible. At the same time, Intel believes that processors do not operate at 100% power, so actual power consumption will be lower.

In the first quarter of 2025, Intel promises to release processors with fewer cores to the market. They are closer to the current fifth generation Xeon: with higher base frequencies, more humane in terms of power consumption and heat dissipation.

Another disadvantage of the new product is the price. For example, the flagship version of the Xeon 6980P Intel recommends sell for $17,800. Selling prices will most likely be lower, but not significantly.

What to expect from new processors

According to Intel, the Xeon 6900P provides tremendous opportunity for partners in the field of AI computing. It doesn't matter whether the processors will be used for data input or as the master node in systems that are accelerated by GPUs like NVIDIA.

We in mClouds We build a cloud infrastructure based on reliable servers with processors from different manufacturers, and each new generation of Intel appears in the cloud. Most likely, the Xeon 6900P will be available in Russia no earlier than spring 2025 – so we still have time to study the new product in more detail. And if expectations are met, we will implement the processor in our cloud.

What do you think about the new Xeon?