Intel Launches Xeon 6 CPUs for AI Acceleration in Datacentres, Desktop Workstations

Intel has unveiled its new Xeon 6700P and 6500P datacentre CPUs aimed at clients who want to dramatically scale up their power efficiency and AI inferencing capabilities, as well as a new Xeon 6300 series for single-socket desktop workstations and small businesses. These CPUs are targeted at image recognition and classification, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, financial services, big data modeling, business intelligence, and similar workloads.

The Xeon 6700P and 6500P slot in below the previously announced Xeon 6900P lineup, with fewer cores and lower specifications, but can be deployed in up to 8-socket configurations. All the newly announced processors feature only Intel’s high-end performance cores (codenamed Redwood Cove), and are collectively known as Xeon 6 With P Cores. 

The Xeon 6700P series features up to 86 cores per socket, for a total of up to 688 cores in a single server. TDP tops out at 350W, and each CPU supports octa-channel DDR5 RAM and up to 136 PCIe 5.0 lanes for connectivity. AVX-512 and AMX (vector and matrix) instruction sets are supported, primarily for AI acceleration.   

Intel announced 22 Xeon 6700P models and 10 Xeon 6500P SKUs, with prices ranging from $553 for the entry-level 150W Xeon 6505P with 12 cores and 48MB cache, to $10,400 for the Xeon 6787P which has a 350W TDP, 88 cores, and 336MB cache. The company also offers Xeon 6 With E Cores, introduced last year, which feature up to 288 denser but lower-power efficiency cores (codenamed Sierra Forest).

For workstation clients and less demanding single-socket server applications, there are also eight new Xeon 6300 series models with four, six or eight cores, and TDP ratings between 55W and 95W. These are equivalent to Intel’s consumer Core Ultra (200-series) desktop models, but using only P-cores with Hyper-Threading enabled, and no E-cores. ECC memory is supported, with up to 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes.  

Intel promises lower total cost of ownership for datacentre clients, based on consolidating multiple previous-generation servers into fewer physical boxes with more cores, lower overall power consumption, and up to 1.4X better performance than the previous generation. Intel also claims superiority in AI inferencing workloads, as rival AMD has rapidly improved its datacentre market share in recent years.

A new Xeon 6 for Network and Edge SoC variant with integrated media acceleration was also announced for applications such as edge networking.