Future Intel ‘Cascade Lake’ Server Platform To Include 6-channel Memory, Up To 224 Cores Per System

It’s becoming hard to predict what Intel is going to do next, and for a number of reasons, that’s a great thing. I sound like a broken record at this point, but it seems clear to me that AMD’s Zen has really lit a fire under Intel’s bottom. We saw it with Coffee Lake, which introduced the first consumer Intel six-core, and we also saw it with Core-X, offering options up to 18 cores. One aspect of the Core-X line that was meant to battle AMD at the lower-end included a couple of quad-cores, but it didn’t even take a full year for those to be effectively canceled.

While AMD has spurred some action from Intel on the mainstream and enthusiast front, it’s also proving a mighty combatant in the enterprise space, with its (up to 32-core) EPYC. The current rumor mill tells us that EPYC 2 could include 64 core parts, although I need to see some seemingly solid information before I start to believe it. If second-gen Ryzen didn’t increase core count on the regular consumer side, and Threadripper 2 is rumored to keep the same core count as well, it seems unlikely that AMD will effectively double core counts from one generation to the next, when it doesn’t need to.

Your eyes are not deceiving you; this image is hard to read

Intel however definitely has EPYC on its mind, as a new leak (via VideoCardz) shows that the company is working on Cascade Lake, a server platform which would directly compete with EPYC. Intel wouldn’t be matching the eight-channel controller, but would still improve-upon current offerings with a six-channel.

On the core-count front, it seems like the biggest Xeon for this platform would be a 28-core part, which falls sort of EPYC’s 32 – but to Intel’s benefit, it bests AMD by offering 4S (4 socket) and 8S configurations, not only 2S. That means that a single system could make use of 224 physical cores, and 448 threads. Four GPUs per socket would then mean 32 cards total for an 8 socket rig – a real beast.

Don’t try and act too surprised, but Cascade Lake is allegedly going to offer much fewer PCIe lanes than EPYC – 48 per CPU, vs. 128. PCIe bandwidth doesn’t matter to the same level for every workload, but we’re talking the enterprise here, and if AMD can offer so many PCIe lanes, it seems strange that Intel won’t make similar progress. That said, it could truly be that Intel doesn’t see a need; its customers need to speak up if that’s not the case.

There’s no expectation right now on when Cascade Lake could launch, but it’s extremely likely that EPYC’s second-generation will get here first, helping AMD move in on Intel’s territory in a potentially big way right when the company is trying to figure out how to best combat its long-standing competition.