Thanks to the explosion of machine learning and AI, innovative technologies are moving from idea to reality faster than ever. Acknowledging this trend, industry analyst Fortune Business Insights predicts that over 80% of organizations will use generative AI in 2026. Over the next five years, the market for AI and cloud microservices is projected to expand dramatically, with AI expected to grow fourfold and cloud microservices fivefold.
Still, amidst all the excitement, it’s easy to forget that such exponential growth begins with superior processors like the Intel Xeon 6.
Intel Xeon 6 Processors
Continuing the company’s decades-long tradition of performance improvement, the Intel Xeon 6 offers significant improvements in AI processing and energy efficiency.
The advantages of the Intel Xeon 6 are more apparent in the test results versus the prior generation and a key competitor. Intel separates the Xeon 6 family into two distinct cores with two distinct goals. The Performance cores, or P-cores, are designed for raw speed and throughput for the most challenging AI deployments, and the Efficiency cores, or E-cores, are engineered to deliver increased performance with the greatest possible power efficiency.
More Calculations, Unprecedented Performance
With Intel Xeon 6 P-cores, Intel has added additional Intel AMX support for FP16 and the latest MRDIMM technology. Floating Point 16 (FP16) has become a standard for accelerating AI and ML workloads, especially in critical performance and resource optimization environments. The net result is up to 16x more multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations than Intel AVX-512, which enables the FP16 models to achieve exponentially better AI performance.
Better Memory Throughput and Usage
Memory bandwidth is a critical factor in the performance of AI and ML workloads. To handle increased throughput demands, Intel has added 37% more memory bandwidth than standard DDR5 DIMMs in its P-cores, support for DDR5 6400 high-speed memory in its P-cores and E-cores, and up to 12 memory channels. Then, Intel Ultra Path connect (Intel UPI) 2.0 Xeon 6 offers a 20% increase in intersocket bandwidth. Finally, Xeon 6 provides up to 192 lanes of PCI Gen 5 for two-socket servers and 136 lanes for one-socket platforms. Ultimately, these improvements ensure the processor can handle more extensive and more complex datasets, reducing bottlenecks and improving system efficiency.
Improved Indexing and Search
Vector databases often play a crucial role in AI RAG models. When Intel Xeon 6 processors are used in conjunction with Intel Scalable Vector Search (SVS) libraries, they offer 2.7x indexing performance versus the competition and 7.3x search performance. SVS leverages advanced algorithms to perform high-speed searches across large datasets, making it ideal for recommendation systems, image recognition, and natural language processing applications.
Energy Usage Improvement
More than ever, a data center's growth is governed by its efficiency. As servers process more, they produce greater amounts of heat and require more electricity to cool. To address this challenge, Intel has focused on performance per watt as a key metric. The Intel Xeon 6 E-cores deliver 2.6x improved processing performance over 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and can be deployed at higher densities.
For example, one server running an Intel Xeon 6 processor can replace four machines running 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, drastically reducing the footprint required. Similarly, three racks of 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor servers can replace only one rack server running an Intel Xeon 6 E-core.
Intel Xeon 6 Improvements in Detail
In head-to-head testing, Intel Xeon 6 demonstrated the following improvement over 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors:
In Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors:
- Up to 3x Llama2 performance with Intel AMX
- Up to 2x better HammerDB MySQL performance
- Up to 2.5x better performance for HPCG with MRDIMM
In Intel Xeon 6 E-core processors:
- Up to 1.5x better performance/watt for server-side Java throughput
- Up to 1.6x better performance/watt for MySQL OLTP
- Up to 1.5x higher AVC performance/watt
When tested head-to-head against the AMD EPYC processor, Intel Xeon 6 delivered:
In Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors:
- Up to 5.5x better AI inferencing performance with MRDIMM
- Up to 2.4x better performance for MongoDB
In Intel Xeon 6 E-core processors:
- Up to 1.3x Media Transcode performance/watt
- Up to 1.25x MySQL OLTP performance/watt
Real-World Use Cases
The enhancements in Intel Xeon 6 make it a powerhouse for many AI and ML applications. In healthcare, for example, the processor's ability to handle large datasets and perform complex computations quickly can accelerate the development of predictive models for disease diagnosis and treatment. In finance, Intel Xeon 6 can enhance fraud detection systems by processing vast amounts of transaction data in real time. Additionally, the processor's high performance and efficiency in autonomous vehicles can improve the accuracy and speed of object detection and decision-making algorithms.
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