Emerald Rapids is expected to use the Raptor Cove core architecture, an optimized variant of the Golden Cove core that will provide a 5-10% improvement in IPC over the Golden Cove core. That’s a small boost compared to the Sapphire Rapids chip’s 56 cores and 112 threads.
This will be more or less the same as the existingAMDEPYC Milan and Roma have corresponding core counts, but we already know that rivals’ upgraded models, codenamed Genoa and Bergamo, will offer 50% more cores/threads than Emerald Rapids and they will be fully available in 2023 listed.
Turning to platform specifics, the Eagle Stream ecosystem will allow SKUs supporting 125-350W TDP on Socket E (LGA 4677), enabling Sapphire Rapids-SP support. There will be huge scalability options in the HPC and data center areas, including 1S, 2S, 4S, 8S and even more sockets (supported by xNC) to increase compute and core density. The chips will be equipped with the latest accelerators, incl.
Intel Data Streaming Accelerator
Intel QuickAssist Technology
Intel Dynamic Load Balancer
Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions
Intel Memory Analytics Accelerator
In addition to this, the platform will be able to support faster DDR5-5600 (1DPC) and reserved DDR5-4800 (2DPC). The 8-channel DDR5 memory platform will allow up to two DIMMS per channel, for a total of 16 DIMMs per socket, and each socket can support a DRAM density of 24Gb. There is also Crow Pass Persistent Memory support “Crystal Ridge 3.0” feature also listed, there will be four UPI 2.0 links running at higher x24 speeds with transfer rates up to 20GT/s.
In terms of PCIe lanes, Intel Emerald Rapids Xeon CPUs will have up to 80 PCIe Gen 5 lanes per CPU, in addition to PCIe 4.0 lanes from the North Bridge, and will support x16, x8, x4 and x2 (Gen 4) , will also support shared virtual memory and scalable IO virtualization. The Emmitsburg PCH will provide 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes for managing 1G Ethernet, as well as a x8 DMI connection rated at PCIe 3.0 speeds.
On the security front, the platform will provide:
Intel Trust Domain Extension
Intel SGX has integrity
TME-MK – 128 keys
Platform Firmware Resiliency (PFR) and Peripheral Certification
Hardware Implemented Execution Control
Intel VT-Redirection Protection (formerly HLAT)
Intel Control Flow Execution Technology (CET)
Virtual Machine Denial of Service Prevention
AMD has already released Zen 4 powered EPYC Genoa and Bergamo chips by the time Intel releases Emerald Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs, so the Xeon series may still end up falling behind, only Intel’s advanced instruction set will show some advantage, and one benefit of Emerald Rapids is that it will remain compatible with the Eagle Stream platform (LGA 4677).