Intel Reportedly Planning To Release 1-socket Xeon Gold SKUs

Have you noticed that the CPU market has been really interesting lately? It’s true for desktop, and even truer for the enterprise. This is a market that has for a long time skewed itself towards Intel, making it unfathomably difficult to take a chunk out of. AMD’s first-gen EPYC platform brought some serious competition, but in a market that doesn’t exactly move quickly, the company needs to continue to innovate, because by the time companies decide to review their available options, whichever side looks more attractive will win.

Intel’s first-gen Xeon Scalable processors aimed to combat the competition with a variety of SKUs aimed at many different parts of the market. As we learned a couple of weeks ago, the second-gen parts bolster the selection further, with workload-specific SKUs, as well as “advanced” performance 32-56 core options being made available. To think of a single processor delivering over 100 threads on its own is enough to get any performance-loving geek excited.

As impressive as Intel’s announced lineup last week was, it turns out that even more may have had their existence held back. ServeTheHome reports that Intel has followed in the footsteps of AMD and will be releasing special 1P (1 socket only) SKUs to take on EPYC, with at least three models ranging between $1,000~$2,000 planned.

STH‘s Patrick Kennedy says that all of the SKUs will fall into the Xeon Gold branding, with 6200-class parts delivering either 20 or 24 cores. Against EPYC, Intel would fall behind in the core count battle, but that of course only paints us a part of the full performance picture. 1P SKUs might not seem too interesting at first glance, but consider this: a Xeon Gold 6212U 24-core chip could cost $2,000, which looks mighty attractive against the $4,700 Platinum 8260 24-core chip that sports the same base and Turbo clocks. While the chip would lose UPI links, the TDP would remain the same, at 165W.

Either AMD helped Intel realize that there’s good reason for 1P processors to exist in the enterprise market, or Intel simply wants to put the squeeze on AMD any way it can. As consumers, it’s a bit of fun to watch the war of chips be played out.