Intel today announced that its forthcoming Cooper Lake Xeon Scalable processors, based on Intel’s 14nm++ process, will come with up to 56-cores in a socketed form factor, leveraging the capabilities from its Xeon Platinum 9200 series. The new chip — the first to support bfloat16, targeting AI workloads — is packaged in a multichip module (MCM), like the Platinum 9200 series (Cascade Lake-AP); no further microarchitectural details were revealed. Intel’s shift toward MCM packaging to boost core count was formally introduced in the spring and follows a similar tack taken earlier by AMD with its chiplet approach.

“[Adding] extended 56-core processor offerings into our mainline Intel Xeon Scalable platforms enables us to serve a much broader range of customers who hunger for more processor performance and memory bandwidth,” according to Lisa Spelman, Intel VP and GM, Data Center Marketing. Spellman said the 9200 has generated interest from customers deploying the technology to run their high-performance computing (HPC), advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and high-density infrastructure.

The new offering “will deliver twice the processor core count (up to 56 cores), higher memory bandwidth, and higher AI inference and training performance compared to the standard Intel Xeon Platinum 8200 processor,” said Intel.The future 56-core Cooper Lake processor is also expected to deliver a lower power envelope than the current Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 processors. (See HPCwire article, Intel Announces Cooper Lake, Advances AI Strategy)

Cooper Lake will be the first x86 processor to deliver built-in high-performance AI training acceleration capabilities through bfloat16 support added to Intel Deep Learning Boost. According to Intel, the Cooper Lake line will have platform compatibility with the upcoming 10nm Ice Lake processor. (See HPCwire article, Intel 7nm GPU on Roadmap for 2021, OneAPI Coming This Year)

Xeon Platinum 9200 processors are available for purchase today as part of a pre-configured systems from select OEMs, including Atos, HPE, Lenovo, Penguin Computing, Megware and authorized Intel resellers. Noteworthy, just last week Advania Data Centers (ADC) announced the industry’s first HPC cloud service based on Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 processors.

Intel reports that the new Cooper Lake chips will debut in the first half of 2020.