Intel pitches new 4th Gen Xeon chips as its "most sustainable" data centre processors

Chip giant Intel has claimed its new 4th Gen Xeon processor range is both a historic moment for the company and also its most sustainable data centre processors ever released.

The launch included the 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon Scalable processors, the Xeon CPU Max Series (codenamed "Sapphire Rapids HBM"), and the "Ponte Vecchio" Data Center Max Series GPU.

For data centres, the CPU is designed so that it optimises power and performance in ways that help customers achieve their sustainability goals.

They focus on platform-level power savings; the 4th Gen Xeon has more built-in accelerators, a type of hardware specifically designed to improve performance on the chip itself. It takes away any need for additional discrete acceleration devices or software which could ramp up energy consumption and price.

Intel's new range also comes with an Optimised Power Mode which the company claims can deliver up to 20% socket power savings with just a 5% impact on performance.

There are also new air and liquid cooling technologies, but one of the most notable innovations relates to the way the 4th Gen Xeon has been built at Intel's manufacturing sites with "state-of-the-art water reclamation facilities" that use 90% or more renewable electricity.

The launch of the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable and the Max Series is a "pivotal moment" in the resurgence of Intel, according to Sandra Rivera, the company's executive vice president and general manager of Data Centre and AI.

Intel has struggled over the last few years with underwhelming market performance and production delays, which have also been exacerbated by the pandemic and global supply chain bottlenecks.

"Intel's 4th Gen Xeon and the Max Series product family deliver what customers truly want - leadership performance and reliability within a secure environment for their real-world requirements - driving faster time to value and powering their pace of innovation," Rivera said.

Combined with the Data Center GPU Max Series, the CPU Max Series can achieve up to 12.8 times greater performance compared to previous generations when running the LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator, according to Intel.

Latest chips in action

Lenovo has collaborated with Intel on the new chips and has released 25 new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile server and hyperconverged cluster products, all powered by Intel's 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The new products sit in the company's Infrastructure Solutions v3 portfolio and aim to deliver "advanced performance, efficiency and management capabilities specifically optimised for complex workloads," the company said in an announcement.

Lenovo said its latest products are able to achieve double the workload performance compared to the previous iterations.

"In today’s competitive business climate, modern infrastructure solutions that generate faster insights and more efficiently enable complex workloads from the edge to the cloud are critical across every major industry," said Kamran Amini, VP and GM of server and storage at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.

"With the performance and management improvements of the Intel-based ThinkSystem V3 portfolio, customers can reduce their IT footprint by up to three times to achieve greater ROI and more easily transform their infrastructure with one seamless platform designed for today’s AI, virtualisation, multi-cloud and sustainable computing demands."