Intel Reveals Bold Multiyear Xeon Roadmap to Accelerate Data Center Leadership and Growth

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

At Intel’s 2022 Investor Meeting, the company provided the first view of its new Intel Xeon roadmap extending through 2024. Paving the way for continued growth and leadership in the data center market, Intel is adding a new ultra-efficient processor family (code-named Sierra Forest) to its lineup, upgrading key products to more advanced process nodes and introducing a new, wide-ranging architecture strategy for the data center. These new next-generation products will fuel the company's growth across cloud, network and edge.

“Today we're giving the world a clear view of our industry-leading Xeon roadmap, which will fuel our growth and leadership through 2024 and beyond,” said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. “This diversified product portfolio has been developed in tight partnership with our customers, based on their diverse needs, aligned to their timelines and designed to fuel even more innovations with their developer ecosystems.”

A New Architecture; A Leadership Roadmap

Intel’s new architecture strategy for future generations of Xeon will have a dual-track roadmap of Performance-core (P-core) and Efficient-core (E-core) based products, moving from two optimized platforms into one common, industry-defining platform. This new path will maximize performance-per-watt, segment features and Intel’s overall competitiveness within the industry. While introducing this new approach, Intel reinforced its compatibility with the vast Xeon platform ecosystem that exists today and the benefits that customers will get from a single investment.

Sapphire Rapids: For its P-core lineup on Intel 7, Intel highlighted Sapphire Rapids, its most feature-rich Xeon to date that extends its data center leadership position in several key areas, including AI performance and security features. Next month, Intel will start initial shipment of Sapphire Rapids for revenue, leading the industry’s transition to next-generation memory and interface standards, including DDR5, PCIe Gen5 and the new Compute Express Link high-speed interconnect.

Emerald Rapids: In 2023, Intel will deliver Emerald Rapids, the next-generation P-core processor on the Intel 7 process node. The processor will be a socket-compatible refresh to Sapphire Rapids, improving performance and extending the memory and security benefits in the existing platform, providing an easily adoptable and valuable upgrade for Intel’s customers.

Sierra Forest: As part of this new strategy, Intel presented for the first time details of Sierra Forest, its new E-core-based Xeon processor for the data center. It will deliver performance-per-watt efficiency and unmatched density that bolsters total cost of ownership benefit. This new product, slated for 2024, is designed for the needs of Intel’s hyperscale customers as a purpose-built solution with a uniquely optimized core for cloud workloads.

Granite Rapids: Reinforcing its confidence in the health of the Intel 3 process node, Intel announced that it will upgrade Granite Rapids from Intel 4 to the Intel 3 process. This next-generation P-core Xeon product comes in 2024 and will solidify Intel’s leadership in the industry.

Momentum with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

As this new look at Intel’s data center roadmap shares future innovations with customers, Intel is also seeing strong momentum with its current 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), which are optimized for modern workloads.  Intel has already shipped nearly 2 million units to customers around the globe and shipped more than 1 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone. What’s more, overall Intel Xeon shipments in December 2021 exceeded the total server CPU shipments by any single competitor for all of 2021.