By Lisa Spelman

We are in a time of tremendous change. Digital experiences have permeated every aspect of our lives, and companies are increasingly succeeding or failing based on their ability to use technology for competitive advantage in the market. A driving force of this transformation is the explosion of data fueled by a growing number of end devices and richer data streams. Although transparent to most people, the data centers and networks that empower us to transform that data into valuable information are critical for enabling new digital experiences and gaining deeper insights to the world around us.

As the capabilities and capacity of data centers and networks advance, they allow us to do incredible things, like sequencing the genome in less than a day, then using artificial intelligence to make precise health care recommendations for each patient’s unique condition. Like enabling content providers to make personalized consumer recommendations, then streaming that content to the viewer in real time. Like enabling cars to gather real-time data, then leveraging that data to make driving safer and more enjoyable. Like letting retailers know exactly where and what inventory is available, then offering shoppers augmented reality and personalized offers in real time. These data-driven insights and experiences unlock extraordinary value for businesses, consumers and society at large.

Press Kit: Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family

At Intel, we take our role as the provider of the foundation of data center computing seriously. That’s why this summer, we will unveil our next-generation Intel® Xeon® processor family (code-named “Skylake”), which represents the biggest set of data center platform advancements in this decade. To reflect the magnitude of the innovations we are bringing to market with this platform, we will rename the family the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family.

The new Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family represents a major architectural leap forward in processor architecture and platform advancements, delivering workload-optimized performance for compute, network and storage. The Scalable family provides the foundation for the next generation of cloud infrastructure to fuel applications as wide-ranging as analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, high-performance computing and network transformation. As we have with every generation of Intel Xeon processor delivery, the Scalable family will also feature breakthrough performance, security and agility.

The Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family is re-architected from the ground up and will be the successor to the Intel Xeon processor E5 and E7 product lines. It will incorporate unique features for compute, network and storage workloads, and impressive performance gains of up to 3.9x higher scalability for virtualized workloads as compared with the 4-year-old systems widely used in the market today, allowing customers to run more and a more diverse variety of workloads on each system.

The Scalable family will feature integrated performance accelerators such as Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT), as well as Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), a new platform capability designed to deliver seamless management of PCIe-based (NVMe) solid state drives, such as the recently launched Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X and Intel® SSD DC P4600 drives. Intel® VMD enables a “hot plug” capability that minimizes service interruptions during drive swaps.

The Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family will offer four levels of performance and capabilities, with a wealth of configuration choice with regard to which integrations and accelerators customers need, and a new tiered model based on metals (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) to make the options simple and efficient to choose.

This new platform also builds on the exhaustive work we’ve been doing with the ecosystem over the past decade to ensure a choice of fully optimized, easy-to-deploy solutions in the marketplace. We are working closely with our Builders ecosystem to create a wide range of workload-optimized solutions that will take full advantage of the new capabilities and performance of the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family.

We believe the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family – which is already being embraced by a wide range of cloud providers and leading enterprises around the world – will be a catalyst for organizations to modernize their data centers, offering much greater flexibility and choice in how data center technologies are adopted and deployed, and reducing complexity and test and validation overhead.

We look forward to sharing more details about when we launch the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family this summer.

Lisa Spelman is vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing at Intel Corporation.