Review: Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Processor 2P (Ice Lake)

Conclusion

Arguably a year late to the table, Intel has launched a plethora of datacenter products aligned with the release of 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processors.

Codenamed Ice Lake and built on 10nm, Intel improves upon every meaningful facet compared to the Cascade Lake predecessors. There are more cores, higher IPC, better I/O, increase in cache and memory channels, support for newer Optane Memory, and cheaper pricing.

These are important benefits for any company thinking about updating their datacentre infrastructure from older hardware, though the necessary cost is a complete change in platform. That's not such a bad deal when there's a clear upgrade path on the horizon, but with next-generation Sapphire Rapids touted to offer a true step-change in performance, albeit with a different socket, opportunities for these Ice Lake parts are limited.

Intel still controls over 90 per cent market share for server processors and has invested in significant additional hardware resident in platforms, from super-fast NICs, speedy SSDs to add-in accelerators. Taken as a sum, the overall 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable proposition is robust, especially so to customers who have their workloads finely tuned to Team Blue, so Ice Lake represents a viable option to users needing the most Intel-based compute power right now.

Bottom line: Ice Lake would have been a really fine Xeon update if released over a year ago, as originally planned. In Q2 2021, however, it serves as a means for Intel to play features and performance catch-up to rival AMD's Epyc chips.

Intel Xeon Platinum 8380

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TBC.

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