Launched today - 25th February 2020 - are a number of parts complementing the existing 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Family processors. Coined "Cascade Lake Refresh" or CLX-R, these SKU's can be identified by their "R" suffix, indicating that they are part of the mid-life cycle refresh.
Benefiting from additional cores or increased base and turbo frequency over their non refresh counterparts, these new SKU's deliver enhanced performance per dollar per watt and enable coverage of a number of new frequency leadership, mainstream and value segments.
Frequency Leadership SKU's include the 6258R, a 28 core part with optimised pricing and huge last level cache which is perfect for compute intensive applications. Previously such extreme core counts had been restricted to the more expensive 8000/Platinum series with likely unnecessary features such as 8 socket support.
In the upper mainstream a pair of 16 core units with improved base and turbo clock speeds are also introduced. The 6248R with a base of 3.4GHz and the 6226R with a base of 2.9GHz promise to deliver both core count and frequency demanded by latency sensitive media streaming, CDN and high performance - for example video editing and 3D design.
A number of SKU's are also delivered to the value and lower core count segment too. A highlight is the 4215R which is an 8 core part with a base frequency of 3.2GHz. Perfect for those whose applications run across fewer cores, but demand a high frequency to obtain the best performance - for example video editing and 3D design.
All these SKU's drop into existing Purley based system (X11DP) and operate with a BIOS update. The extra performance isn't completely free however; there is an increase in the TDP of refresh SKU's when compared to models which might share the same name. For this reason it is important to balance this up and check that your platform has sufficient cooling and TDP support as restrictions do apply to the deployment of some of these models.
If you're unsure what impact the refresh SKU might have on your system design or application, never fear. The team at Boston Labs are currently testing and have a range of samples available for remote access and benchmarking purposes - just get in touch with the details of your project and we'll work closely with you to get the best solution design for you.