New information about Intel's future enterprise processors has surfaced during an Asus presentation. Korean publication Brainbox snapped a photograph of a PowerPoint slide that seemingly compares Intel's past and present processor microarchitectures with the upcoming Cooper Lake and Ice Lake.
Ice Lake-SP (ICL-SP), which is based on Intel's latest 10nm process node, is supposed to arrive shortly after Cooper Lake-SP. The PowerPoint slide points to the third quarter of 2020. Apparently, Ice Lake-SP parts will max out at 38 cores and 270W TDP. They allow up to three UPI links and offer up to 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes.
Cooper Lake-SP and Ice Lake-SP reside on the Whitley platform. Both support dual-socket configurations, eight memory channels and DDR4-3200 modules. However, only Ice Lake-SP parts are compatible with second-generation Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.
The new processors will likely drop into the LGA4189 socket, which comes in two variants. The LGA4189-4 socket (Socket P4) houses Ice Lake-SP and Cooper Lake-4 parts while the LGA4189-5 (Socket P5) is exclusively for Cooper Lake-6 parts.
AMD has already set the bar really high with its EPYC Rome processors. The chipmaker's EPYC Milan processors, which are reportedly based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture and 7nm+ node, are rumored to drop next year as well. Whichever way you look at it, Intel has a hard road ahead.
