Established more than five decades ago, Intel is a technology industry staple. It is one of the leading names in the semiconductor business globally. The company designs and manufactures chipsets and microprocessors for a variety of computer and technology companies including Dell, HPE and Lenovo among others. In 2020, the company earned a whopping $77.8 billion, making it the world’s largest supplier of chips by revenue.
Earlier this year, Intel launched the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named ‘Ice Lake’), which is aimed at enabling customers to harness the power of AI. ITP.net spoke to Intel director for Sales Enablement – Service Providers EMEA, Ahmed Ibrahim, to discuss the unique features of Intel Ice Lake and how it can propel organisations into a digitally powered future.
How can Intel Ice Lake transform today’s data centres?
The recently launched 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, code-named “Ice Lake” is our most advanced, highest-performing data centre platform. It is optimised to power the industry’s broadest range of workloads — from the cloud to the network to the intelligent edge.
The emergence and rapid rise of the cloud have hugely impacted the approach and workloads across organisations. Companies and industries alike are now looking at a robust IT infrastructure, supporting the increasing workloads to drive their business forward. Addressing the growing demand and needs of today’s businesses, our new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors enables data centres to deliver significant performance increase, with an average 46% improvement on popular data centre workloads compared to its predecessor.
The new processors are the foundation of Intel’s data centre platform, enabling customers to capitalise on some of the most significant business opportunities today by leveraging the power of AI.
Can you tell us more about Ice Lake’s AI capabilities? Why was it vital for Intel to integrate AI in this new solution?
As the only data centre CPU with built-in AI acceleration, extensive software optimisations, and turnkey solutions, the new processors make it possible to infuse AI into every application from edge to network to cloud. The in-built AI capabilities of Ice Lake allows the platform to provide more valuable data insights.
The new and enhanced platform capabilities with AI, combined with our broad portfolio of Intel Select Solutions and Intel Market Ready Solutions, enable customers to accelerate deployments across cloud, AI, enterprise, high-performance computing (HPU), networking, security, and edge applications.
Our much-anticipated processors leverage Intel’s 10-nanometer process technology and feature up to 40 cores per processor from the previous generation’s 28. They have built-in AI and cryptography capabilities with new security features and are faster and better optimised for modern workloads that run in both on-premises and distributed multi-cloud environments. The processors provide customers with a flexible architecture including built-in acceleration and advanced security capabilities.
With Ice Lake’s robust security features, how can it help reduce risks for data?
The new 3rd Gen Xeon processors are incorporated with Intel’s Deep Learning (DL) Boost Technology that improves AI application performance. This is coupled with Intel’s Software Extensions (SGX) and Crypto Acceleration to further enhance its security capabilities.
Based on hundreds of research studies and production deployments, Intel SGX protects sensitive code and data with the smallest potential attack surface within the system. It is now available on 2-socket Xeon Scalable processors with enclaves that can isolate and process up to 1 terabyte of code and data to support the demands of mainstream workloads. Combined with new features, including Intel Total Memory Encryption and Intel Platform Firmware Resilience, the latest Xeon Scalable processors address today’s most pressing data protection concerns.
Many of Intel’s most security-conscious enterprise and cloud customers have built protected applications using Intel SGX, and the Intel SGX developer community and number of applications continue to expand.
Can you please explain Intel’s XPU vision? What does this entail and what’s the driver behind this?
As the world moves into an era of billions of intelligent devices and an exponential growth of data, CPUs alone require a shift in focus to a mix of architectures across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators. Intel collectively describes this as “XPU” vision. The launch of the Intel Server GPU is another step to extend Intel’s offering in the XPU era.
This era of computing also requires a comprehensive software stack. Developers will be able to access a common, open and standards-based programming model across Intel XPUs with Intel’s oneAPI toolkits. They deliver on the performance potential of the underlying hardware and lower software development and maintenance costs while reducing risks associated with deploying accelerated computing relative to proprietary, vendor-specific solutions.
Ice Lake Wafer
Can you share some insights into Intel’s strategy for the region?
With a goal to accelerate the region’s digital transformation, our unique ‘Project Mustakbal’ has rapidly established a sound IT ecosystem and a shared goal with our partners, including Etisalat Digital, Honeywell, Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA), and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) among others.
Committed to supporting the governments and ecosystems in the region, Project Mustakbal is helping the region towards the goal of digitalisation and diversify into knowledge-based economies. We provide technical, sales and marketing resources and create partnerships with key ecosystem players including OEMs, ISVs, and Sis who offer end-to-end solutions, scaling from edge computing to the network, the cloud, and the emerging field of AI and autonomous driving.
Furthermore, our One Intel Team has collaborated with the likes of HPC in Saudi Aramco, Smart Cities with Moro Hub in Dubai, and RAN Virtualisation with Saudi Telecom to deliver new transformational deals in the region. Meanwhile, we entered into new partnership agreements with Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA), Sharjah Research and Technology Innovation Park (SRTIP), Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge (ADEK), and more.
What kinds of new innovations can we expect from Intel in the coming months?
Intel believes evolving data centres will require a new intelligent architecture where large-scale distributed heterogeneous compute works together and is connected seamlessly to appear as a single compute platform. This intelligent data centre architecture will have three categories of compute – CPU (for general purpose compute), XPU (for application-specific or workload-specific acceleration), and IPU (for infrastructure acceleration) – that will be connected through programmable networks to efficiently utilise data centre resources.
The infrastructure processing unit (IPU), a programmable networking device designed to enable cloud and communication service providers to reduce overhead and free up performance for CPUs. With an IPU, customers will better utilise resources with a secure, programmable, stable solution that enables them to balance processing and storage.
It allows cloud operators to shift to a fully virtualised storage and network architecture while maintaining high performance and predictability, as well as a high degree of control.
The IPU has dedicated functionality to accelerate modern applications that are built using a microservice-based architecture in the data centre. Research from Google and Facebook has shown 22% to 80% of CPU cycles can be consumed by microservices communication overhead.
With the IPU, a cloud provider can securely manage infrastructure functions while enabling its customer to entirely control the functions of the CPU and system memory.
