During its Innovation Conference, Intel announced not only Meteor Lake, but also some new Xeon features. One of these new features takes the form of a very large CPU with a total of 288 cores! However, there’s a little subtlety to it, as you’ll see.
Xeon: a 288-core model unveiled by Intel!
At first glance, such a model might seem like ” bye bye AMD “, but it’s not. In fact, to integrate such a large number of cores into its processor, Intel has opted for E-Cores, or efficient cores as they’re known. Their role is to compete with ARM’s offer and AMD’s (Bergamo) Zen 4C processors… These are more limited in number of cores: 128, but feature hyperthreading with 256 threads. Intel, on the other hand, offers 288 cores and 288 threads. It remains to be seen whether Intel or AMD will have the most efficient cores.
To go into a little more detail, the blue ones use Gracemont cores, the same E-Core found in the 12th and 13th generation Core i systems. These are distributed across two tiles of 144 cores each, using Intel Process 3 (5 nm). In addition to these two core arrays, the processor also features two I/O dies engraved with the Intel 7 process.
What makes it possible to fit so many cores into a processor is, of course, their simplicity. By way of comparison, with Sapphire Rapids, Intel only managed to squeeze 56 P-Cores into one processor. This is the configuration of the Xeon W9-3495X we recently. This number of performance cores will be increased to 64 for Emeralds Rapids and perhaps 120 for Granite Rapids.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, this is a Sierra Forest processor we’ve mentioned several times… Except that here, we’re talking about the angrier version, with twice as many cores as the model unveiled in August!
