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The cadence of Intel’s enterprise processor portfolio is designed to support customers that use the hardware with a guarantee of socket and platform support for at least three years. As a result, we typically get two lots of processors per socket: Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, Broadwell and Haswell, and now Cascade Lake joins Skylake. Intel’s new Second Generation Xeon Scalable (the official name) still comes in the new ‘Platinum / Gold / Silver / Bronze’ nomenclature, but this time offering up to 56 cores if you want the processor equivalent of Wolverine at your disposal. Not only is Intel offering more cores, but there’s Optane support, faster DRAM, new configurations, and better specialization that before. Intel also surprised us with better-than-expected hardware support for Spectre and Meltdown mitigations while still providing higher performance overall.

Processor Evolution: Growing Eyes and Limbs

Updating a processor portfolio is a multi-faceted issue. There are the obvious improvements that a company can aim for: more performance, better efficiency, lower power. Then there are the not so obvious improvements that might be customer specific: support for new instructions, layered ecosystem optimizations, support for new technology, or a new product direction. The focus on Intel’s new Second Generation Enterprise Xeon Scalable processors, known as Cascade Lake, is ever so much on the latter.

Cascade Lake builds on a foundation of Skylake by enhancing those secondary characteristics that very often take a back seat to a standard product announcement. The cynic on the room might suggest that as the microarchitecture is the same as the previous generation, there is no improvement, but Intel has enhanced its offering by focusing product implementations, developed special features for emerging markets, enhanced security, and, for those adventurous enough, put two high-performance processors into a single package. By enhancing the periphery of the product and the ecosystem, a new generation is born.

What does this mean in reality? What characteristics have changed? Here’s a bullet point list which we will go into more detail.