With the launch of its AST2600 Baseboard Management Controller for servers, Aspeed provided a roadmap that places the launch of Intel’s 2021 data center chip early in the year, which would make it a fast successor to Ice Lake-SP, which Intel recently delayed to the second half of 2020.
The roadmap comes from Aspeed and surfaced on Twitter. It shows that Intel will launch Eagle Stream in 2021. Its placing strongly indicates that the product will be launched quite early in the year. Eagle Stream is the company’s data center platform that will succeed next year’s Whitley platform, which consists of Cooper Lake-SP in the first half and Ice Lake-SP in the second half of 2020.
Eagle Stream too will be a platform for two processors: Sapphire Rapids (10nm++) in 2021 and Granite Rapids (7nm) in 2022. Although Intel hasn’t formally announced the platform yet, its name and the two processors showed up in a leak earlier this year, along with information that it supports DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and CXL. That roadmap also showed an early 2021 release for Sapphire Rapids, so while it is technically not new information, it is reassuring that the cadence has not changed as Intel announced the delay of Ice Lake-SP to the second half of 2020 at its July earnings conference call.
Sapphire Rapids was also disclosed in an official data center roadmap earlier this year. Intel said that it would accelerate its data center cadence to release a new processor generation every four to five quarters, too. For Sapphire Rapids that could have been interpreted as 4-5 quarters after Ice Lake , which does not seem to be the case.
Aspeed is the leading provider of Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs). As Serve The Home explained, it is a chip in practically all server motherboards and provides administrator functions over the network (such as rebooting), without the admin having to physically go to the server. The new AST2600 now has three cores (two Arm A7s and one M3) and 2GB of DDR4.
