200,000 are already in the hands of customers, says Intel
The Big Beast of the range is the 40-core Xeon Platinum 8380.
The Sunny Cove core microarchitecture is claimed to deliver a generational IPC gain of around 20%,
Intel has returned to revered marketing ploys of 50 years ago by focussing not on the performance of the processor but the overall performance it can deliver when used with Intel’s proprietary peripheral ICs.
The Ice Lake chips have new accelerators for AI and cryptography.
They support 4 TB of DRAM and 2 TB of Intel Optane Persistent Memory, eight channels of memory and 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity per socket.
Security is boosted by Intel Software Guard Extensions and Total Memory Encryption.
Intel is also pointing out that whereas its x86 rival has to compete for scarce foundry capacity, it is a more reliable supplier because it has in-house fabrication.