At Hot Chips ’23, Intel dished a few more details about its upcoming E-core-only Xeon processors.
PC gamers and power users sometimes sneer at Intel’s E-cores because they aren’t as fast on a single thread as the company’s powerful P-cores. Demanding client tasks—like many operations in creative applications as well as, of course, games—tend to be single-threaded, or at least held up by a single slow thread. In that case, having super-fast CPU cores that can crunch through one thread at breakneck speed is of critical importance.
In servers, however, some workloads are better served by handling many, many requests simultaneously, where each request is perhaps not particularly intensive for a modern CPU and the overhead from task switching becomes a liability. There are also cases where your task scales perfectly across as many cores as you can manage—often known as „embarrassingly parallel“ workloads. In situations like these, having 140% more cores is better than having 30% faster cores.Sierra Forest Many-Core Xeons Are Coming
That’s exactly what Intel is set to deliver with its upcoming Xeon parts code-named Sierra Forest. They’re part of a two-pronged approach, along with the more conventional Granite Rapids Xeon family, which will be built using P-cores as usual. Sierra Forest, as you’ve probably surmised, will instead use E-cores, exclusively. While this will probably have some deleterious effects on the single-threaded performance of those machines compared to Granite Rapids, it will allow Intel to pack up to 144 CPU cores into a single CPU socket.
