Intel Promises Next Year's Xeons Will Challenge AMD On Memory, IO Channels
The Register, Monday, August 28,2023
Intel at the Hot Chips 2023 conference shed light on the architecture changes, including improvements to memory subsystems and IO connectivity, coming to next-gen Xeon processors.
While the x86 giant's fifth-gen Xeon Scalable processors are still a few months off, the chipmaker is already looking ahead to its next-gen Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids Xeons to catch up with long-time rival AMD, particularly when it comes to memory and IO.
Intel's current crop of Xeon Scalable processors - code-named Sapphire Rapids - top out at eight channels of DDR5 DRAM at 4,800MT/s and 80 lanes of PCIe 5.0 / CXL 1.1 connectivity. That's compared to 12 channels and 128 PCIe lanes on AMD's Epyc 4 platform.