Intel Unveils New Xeon 6 Series Chipsets With Focus on AI Workloads

Intel unveiled two new processor series in the Xeon 6 family on Monday. Dubbed Intel Xeon 6700 and Xeon 6500 series, the new processors offer improved performance and power efficiency compared to the previous generation. It is based on the x86 computer architecture and comes with up to 86 cores. The chipmaker claimed that the newly launched chipsets also feature dedicated Performance cores (P-cores) and are aimed at complex artificial intelligence (AI) tasks, traditional enterprise apps, and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions.

Intel Xeon 6700/6500 Series Processors Introduced

In a newsroom post, the chipmaker detailed the new processors in the Intel Xeon 6 family. Alongside the 6700 and 6500 series, the company also unveiled Xeon 6 for network and edge, a system-on-chip (SoC) designed for high performance and power efficiency. Notably, these are not retail-focused processors, and are instead aimed at data centres.

According to the company, the Intel Xeon 6700 and 6500 series processors with P-cores offer 1.4X higher performance compared to the fifth generation of Intel Xeon processors, and can also handle a more diverse set of workloads, with a focus on enterprise tasks. The company said that it is also designed to work with AI systems and can handle complex tasks.

Intel Xeon 6700 and 6500 series specifications
Photo Credit: Intel

Compared to the fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors, the Xeon 6700 and 6500 series chipsets are claimed to offer up to 1.5X better performance in AI inference while using only two-thirds of the cores. Intel also claimed that the chipsets offer improved performance-per-watt efficiency allowing for 5:1 consolidation of a five-year-old server on average.

Coming to technical specifications, the new chipsets feature up to 86 cores with a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of between 150 to 300W. It comes with up to eight channels of DDR5 MRDIMM (multiplex ranked DIMM) memory, up to 88 lanes for PCIe 5.0 which goes up to 136 lanes for single socket design, as well as 64 lanes CXL 2.0.

On the other hand, the Intel Xeon 6 for network and edge uses in-built accelerators for virtualised radio access networks (vRAN), media, AI, and network security. The company said the processor is designed to address the growing demand for network and edge solutions in the AI-driven world.

These SoCs also deliver a 70 percent improvement in performance-per-watt with 2.4X the RAN capacity compared to the previous generation. The Xeon 6 for network and edge also features the Intel Media Transcode Accelerator, an in-built media accelerator that further improves power optimisation.