With up to 40 'Sunny Cove' cores per processor, built-in acceleration and new instructions, the Ice Lake-SP platform is said to be able to offer a significant performance boost for AI, HPC, networking and cloud workloads, according to Intel.
In addition to increasing the core count from 28 to 40 over the previous-generation Cascade Lake devices, Ice Lake is able to provide eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory per socket and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 per socket, compared to six channels of DDR4-2933 and up to 48 lanes of PCI Gen3 per socket for the previous generation.
As a result of these enhancements, along with AVX-512 for compute acceleration and DL Boost for AI acceleration, Ice Lake is able to deliver, according to Intel, an average 46 percent performance improvement for datacentre workloads and 53 higher average HPC performance, generation-over-generation.
Security has also been boosted by Intel Software Guard Extensions and Total Memory Encryption.
