New Chips Coming from Intel as Data Center Xeon Processors Get a New Name

What's in a name? Well, when your product portfolio is as deep as Intel's, naming conventions help avoid confusion and make a cleaner break between older and new products. The processor giant is reorganizing its data center processors to bring its Xeon processor E5 and E7 product lines into a series designed to serve different data center needs.

"At Intel, we take our role as the provider of the foundation of data center computing seriously," writes Lisa Spelman, VP and GM of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing at Intel Corporation. "That’s why this summer, we will unveil our next-generation Intel Xeon processor family (codenamed “Skylake”), which represents the biggest set of data center platform advancements in this decade. To reflect the magnitude of the innovations we are bringing to market with this platform, we will rename the family the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family."

To make it easier to differentiate the processors, Intel is dividing them by scalability performance using metals—copper, silver, gold and platinum—with copper at the lower end and platinum being the premium offering in the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family. Today's processors have a number of capabilities beyond just processing, and the tiered series allows Intel to tailor its offerings based on data center client I/O, memory, storage and networking needs.

"It will incorporate unique features for compute, network and storage workloads, and impressive performance gains of up to 3.9x higher scalability for virtualized workloads as compared with the 4-year-old systems widely used in the market today, allowing customers to run more and a more diverse variety of workloads on each system," writes Spelman.

You can listen to an Intel employee interview Spelman about the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family below.

https://soundcloud.com/intelchipchat/new-xeon-scalable-family

Sources: Press materials provided by the company.