Intel Confirms Xeon CPU Roadmap – 10nm Ice Lake by 2020

Cascade Lake-SP and Beyond

Intel has announced their official Xeon roadmap up to 2020 at Santa Clara today. This confirms the rumours that their upcoming Cascade Lake-SP as well as Cooper Lake-SP will remain in 14nm.

The Cascade Lake server platform is expected to arrive Q4 2018. With it comes support for hardware security mitigations against side-channel attacks through partitioning plus Intel Optane DC persistent memory. Also, Intel is beefing up their deep learning support by introducing AVX512_VNNI instructions via Intel DL Boost.

The company originally intended to launch this feature with the Ice Lake platform. However, they opted to push it much earlier. This embedded AI accelerator will speed deep learning inference workloads, with an expected 11 times faster image recognition than the current generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors when they launched in July 2017.

Cascade Lake shares the same hardware platform as the Skylake-SP which launched last year. Cooper Lake and Ice Lake however, will be using a different brand-new hardware platform which will have an eight-channel per-socket memory subsystem.

What New Features Will Cooper Lake and Ice Lake Bring?

Following Cascade Lake-SP is Cooper Lake-SP, which will launch in 2019. Although made using the same 14nm process, it will introduce some functional improvements such as the BFLOAT16 feature. Furthermore, this platform will be introducing new I/O features, and additional Intel Optane DC persistent memory innovations.

As for Ice Lake-SP, Intel did not disclose any further details other than it being built using 10nm technology. It shares a common platform with Cooper Lake-SP and will ship in 2020.