Intel's Data Center Event Live Blog (8:30am PT)
by Ian Cutress & Anton Shilov on July 11, 2017 10:00 AM EST11:34AM EDT - I'm here with Anton ready for the live blog
11:35AM EDT - Today Intel is running an event announcing the latest developments in their data center business. We're ready to live blog the registration-only event, and expect to see Navin Shenoy, Intel’s EVP and GM of the Data Center Group (DCG), and Lisa Spelman, DCG’s VP of Products and Marketing on stage.
11:35AM EDT - It's a registration-only event, but it is a webcast
11:37AM EDT - All info for the webcast is here: https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/cloud-computing/overview.html
11:37AM EDT - But it seems to be a little slow in starting anyway...
11:40AM EDT - It begins - they hired a singer to start it at the webcast
11:40AM EDT - Video showing where Intel is used
11:40AM EDT - 'Is your infrastructure ready?'
11:40AM EDT - Navin Shenoy to the stage
11:41AM EDT - 'Today is my first Xeon Platform Launch'
11:41AM EDT - 'Today Intel is bringing the biggest DC advancement in a decade'
11:41AM EDT - 'Breakthrough perfomance, unmatched security'
11:41AM EDT - 'Cloud and network services, to new workloads like automotive and AI'
11:42AM EDT - 'Cloud Companies take new features for their core advantage'
11:42AM EDT - 'Turning to technology for differentiated products is accelerating faster than ever'
11:43AM EDT - 'The increases challenge in farming and retail, usign sensors and analytics'
11:43AM EDT - Three main trends in the industry: Cloud, AI/Analytics, and 5G
11:44AM EDT - 'We're headed towards a hybrid cloud end-state'
11:44AM EDT - e.g. Public cloud and private cloud
11:44AM EDT - Xeons into cloud infrastructure has doubled
11:45AM EDT - 'The rise of AI/Analytics is well documented'
11:45AM EDT - 'Massive amounts of data, but less than 1% generated is actually used/analyzed = opportunity to unlock the value of that data'
11:45AM EDT - '5G is more than a wireless netowrk'
11:46AM EDT - 'It's about connecting what previously wasn't connected, like parking meters etc'
11:46AM EDT - 'The amount of sensors that could be deployed would overwhelm any network as it stands'
11:47AM EDT - 'We need a network that deploys intelligence for infrastucture'
11:47AM EDT - 'Cloud service will need to think about how they deploy performance and security across their infrastructure and will require network agility'
11:48AM EDT - 'DC technology must transform on the inside to deliver what businesses need'
11:48AM EDT - Latest Addition to Intel DC: The Intel Scalable Platform
11:48AM EDT - CPU on stage
11:48AM EDT - Rearchitected CPU, designed from the ground up
11:49AM EDT - 'Industry highest perf/watt platform, designed for hybrid cloud'
11:49AM EDT - 'Revolutionary leap forward'
11:49AM EDT - 'Includes big perf advances in deep learning'
11:50AM EDT - 'Up to 1.65x perf over last generation'
11:50AM EDT - 'This is our gen-on-gen performance improvement in a decade'
11:50AM EDT - '50% more memory bandwidth'
11:50AM EDT - (He said 50% more PCIe.... ?)
11:51AM EDT - 4x perf on VM throughput over a 4yr old server
11:51AM EDT - 65% lower TCO
11:51AM EDT - 5 year development cycle for this CPU
11:52AM EDT - 'no-one knows how to take advantage of this new technology more than the communications industry'
11:53AM EDT - AT&T to the stage
11:54AM EDT - The new technology means a lot to us
11:55AM EDT - 'We need to deploy in weeks - we got the processors in March: we've seen a 30% perfomance improvement already'
11:56AM EDT - 'Software defined networking allows us to evolve at a faster pace
11:58AM EDT - 'high speed, low-latency: real-time compute coming to the edge'
11:59AM EDT - 'We can transform the latest, but also the legacy'
11:59AM EDT - 'Big companies like AT&T are already taking advantage'
11:59AM EDT - Lisa Spelman, VP Xeon to the stage
12:00PM EDT - 'You have to understand the infrastructure requirements'
12:00PM EDT - 'customers want to accelerate their own growth while adjusting to the landscape - regardless of industry'
12:01PM EDT - 'scalable performance is required'
12:01PM EDT - AVX-512, Mesh, QAT
12:02PM EDT - 'AVX-512 makes vector computation easier'
12:03PM EDT - QAT is borne from network workload requirements
12:03PM EDT - 'QAT gives good speedups for security algorithms as well'
12:03PM EDT - '100 Gb/s of crypto and compression'
12:04PM EDT - Now the mesh
12:04PM EDT - 'optimizes data sharing between cores'
12:04PM EDT - Discussing Ring vs Mesh
12:05PM EDT - 'Rings would not scale beyond the number of cores our customers needed'
12:05PM EDT - 'A real data center CPU needs to talk to all memory all the time, and the mesh helps that'
12:06PM EDT - 'It's one thing to add cores, but another to deliver a well balanced system'
12:06PM EDT - '58 new performance world records and counting'
12:06PM EDT - Showing Cisco, DellEMC, Fujitsu, Huawei etc
12:07PM EDT - 'Benchmarks aren't real workloads'
12:07PM EDT - errr
12:08PM EDT - Data minings, simulations, forecasting etc
12:09PM EDT - 'Our customers have an insatiable demand for compute'
12:10PM EDT - Top500 systems already announced
12:10PM EDT - 'Starting from November last year, we've sold 500k+ units already'
12:10PM EDT - ...I thought today was the launch
12:10PM EDT - Google deployment story
12:11PM EDT - Tried to deploy in November
12:11PM EDT - End of a multi-year collaboration between Intel and Google on the microarchitecture based on their network requirements
12:11PM EDT - Video about Google now
12:12PM EDT - 'up to 40% perf improvement, more than 100% perf using tuned AVX-512'
12:13PM EDT - First time, 2S, 4S and 8S socket CPUs launched at the same time
12:13PM EDT - 450+ systems planned
12:13PM EDT - Across cloud, network, storage and fabric
12:13PM EDT - Xeon with OmniPath as well
12:14PM EDT - Encryption overhead: 0.37% overhead
12:14PM EDT - Achieved through AES-NI and AVX-512
12:15PM EDT - From boot to BIOS, to VMs, hardware security is built in
12:16PM EDT - Now blockchains
12:16PM EDT - 'Emerging in a few industry consortia'
12:16PM EDT - 'eliminates the need for a central authority'
12:16PM EDT - Relies on comprehensive encryption
12:17PM EDT - Participating in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
12:17PM EDT - New collaboration with r3 with Xeon-Scalable
12:17PM EDT - Xeon-SP is seen as the foundation of a blockchain platform
12:18PM EDT - Peter Marsden from Thomson Reuters to the stage
12:18PM EDT - 'Driving data through the financial industry'
12:19PM EDT - 'We now see millions of transactions every second'
12:19PM EDT - 'Increase in the data, increase in the analytics'
12:19PM EDT - 'TR is key to that industry for flow and analytics'
12:20PM EDT - 'Our Velocity Analytics performs 2x with the new Intel platform'
12:20PM EDT - 'Using Xeon-SP mainly for performance, but also investing in Optane and storage'
12:21PM EDT - 'Back in 2002, we had 75k/sec messages in our system. Now we have 25 million/sec'
12:21PM EDT - 'We need fewer cores for the same benefit'
12:21PM EDT - Now talking about data latency using the Mesh
12:22PM EDT - That's a shot at AMD's EPYC
12:22PM EDT - We just posted our EPYC vs Skylake-SP review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade
12:23PM EDT - 'Longer term, we're seeing more work on cloud native implementations'
12:24PM EDT - Now on to 'Agility': RAS Features, Virtualization, Optane, and AI/Deep Learning
12:24PM EDT - 'Reducing the overhead of VM migration'
12:24PM EDT - 'Hypervisors need to enforce integrity of VMs and data'
12:25PM EDT - RAS supported in 2/4/8 and above socket configurations
12:25PM EDT - Intel Volume Management Device: Optane SSDs, supporting NVMe Hot Plug
12:25PM EDT - Xeon can do training and inference
12:25PM EDT - 'at scale'
12:26PM EDT - Up to 113x perf vs Xeon v3 (3yr old code) when tuned for training
12:27PM EDT - AWS inference and training performance up to 100x
12:28PM EDT - Now a healthcare provider
12:29PM EDT - 'we migrated into risk-based analytics'
12:30PM EDT - 'In the future, systems are fundamentally information management: they need to store, sort and analyze large amounts of data for analytics'
12:30PM EDT - 'Significant difference between Human Analytics vs Computer Analytics'
12:31PM EDT - 'If you can get parallel processing, you can take on board multiples of data'
12:33PM EDT - 'Combination of Scalable Processors and our systems means we can analyze more at a lower cost, so we can approach new clinical challenges we couldn't before'
12:35PM EDT - Now onto infrastructure
12:35PM EDT - 'Time and money spent on optimal configurations is a barrier to speedy deployment'
12:35PM EDT - 'Unveiling the Intel Select Solution: workload-optimized reference platforms'
12:36PM EDT - 'Allows data centers and customers to deploy quickly'
12:36PM EDT - 3 initial offerings: VMware vSAN, Microsoft SQL, and [went to quick]
12:36PM EDT - *too
12:37PM EDT - Here's a wafer
12:37PM EDT - 20 wide, 8 tall ?
12:38PM EDT - 13 x 9 actually
12:38PM EDT - That seems to be a wrap for the main discussion
12:38PM EDT - We already posted our Skylake-SP vs EPYC review, it's worth a read: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade
11 Comments
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DanNeely - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Is this going to reveal the new Xeon processors HP accidentally leaked earlier. (Seen on the twitter feed before they cleaned it up.)eSyr - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Even top500 leaked these new processors.zepi - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Would it be possible to provide timestamps in UTC as well? People usually know their timezone in relation to UTC, not in relation to Pacific Time.wiineeth - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Is there any livestream?CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
What's extremely interesting about this announcement vs. AMD's dog & pony show for Epyc is that the only numbers AMD could post were intentionally-fudged SPEC benchmarks based on their own in-house testing of old Xeon parts compared to their own in-house-tuned Epyc scores.Intel just shows numbers from third party customers who are actually using Skylake in real-world workloads instead of intentionally gimping Epyc in some in-house bakeoff competition. Kind of shows you why they are most certainly #1 in the real world.
Lord-Bryan - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
We don't yet know what intel's customers are comparing Skylake-sp to,DanNeely - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Hopefully Intel will have the official slide deck out soon. Every number on the big speedup chart was footnoted, presumably with details of what was being measured.Hurr Durr - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
What an unfortunate tagline. It literally says to skip the upcoming CPU gen.SharpEars - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
..., and delivering more heat than my 1,500 W room heater.Kenebrity - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
How does one assess and encourage drive for technological growth in Sub-Saharan Africa?https://raadaa.com/entries/advantages-of-recession...