Intel has announced a host of new data centre processors, along with new and updated entries in its partner-led 'Select Solutions' range, as part of its second-generation Xeon Scalable platform.
In total, nine new and updated products are being added to the Select Solutions portfolio. Each product in the range has been co-developed by Intel and one of its partners, with the goal of optimising it for the partner in question's technology. Select Solutions products cover areas including artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, networking and hybrid cloud, with partners including Huawei, Supermicro and HPE.
The Select Solutions family now includes products designed for AI, HPC and SAP HANA workloads, while products based around Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSAN, network function virtualisation and Microsoft SQL Server have all been updated. The new additions bring the number of products in the range to 21.
Alongside these, the company said that six more Select Solutions will be arriving in the near future, and that more than 35 of its partners are either working on, or currently offering, Select Solutions.
The company also launched more than 50 new Xeon Scalable processors. The new parts are still using Intel's 14nm process, so boast improvements to features and configurability, rather than overwhelming speed increases. The second-generation Xeon Scalable platform supports the company's Optane storage and memory hardware, in addition to various technologies designed to make the chips better suited to AI workloads.
The new chips include protections against the kind of side-channel attacks that exploited the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities discovered last year, as well as including allowing Infrastructure-as-a-Service firms to configure CPU performance and clock speed on a more granular basis.
Topping out with the 56-core, 12-channel Xeon Platinum 9200 series, the new processors also cover Gold, Silver and Bronze categories, with applications including high-end machine learning deployments, software-defined networking and price-conscious entry-level installations.
On top of all of this, Intel also unveiled new 10nm FPGAs, Xeon D-1600 SoCs for edge computing, and a new Ethernet 800-series controller aimed at cloud providers, as well as a set of libraries allowing them to manage Intel's hardware security tools via platforms such as Docker, OpenStack and Kubernetes.
