Skylake-D information shows up on Intel's Price List
This article has largely been replaced by the Xeon D-1200 announcement that arrived on Feb 08 2018, see details at Intel Xeon D-2100 announced, a promising choice for efficient home lab datacenters. Article as it originally appeared below.
This morning, Chris Parker dropped this comment:
right below my article:
The Tech Report
It seems that more solid details are starting to surface about the follow-on to the popular Xeon D SoC (System on a Chip), with up to 256GB of ECC memory or 512GB of LRDIMM memory, explained in the article Chris references:
- Skylake-based Xeon D chips show up on Intel's price list
Feb 01 2018 3:00pm by Zak KillianRemember Xeon D, gerbils? If you're not employed in networking or systems administration, you probably don't—and if you are, you almost certainly do. The extant Xeon-D chips use up to 16 Broadwell CPU cores, take up to 128 GB of ECC DDR4 memory, and have dual on-chip 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Those chips came out about three years ago though, so it's time for an update. Indeed, Intel's just updated its price list, and it now includes the Xeon D-2191, Xeon D-2161I, and Xeon D-2141I.
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AnandTech
Turns out AnandTech also broke this news a little earlier yesterday:
- Skylake-D Creeps Out on Intel’s Price List
Feb 01 2018 11:45am by Ian CutressNews about the next update on Intel’s Xeon-D line has been thin. For over a year now, we were expecting to hear what plans were in store for one of the more esoteric Intel SoC lines: the first generation parts were based on Broadwell, had up to sixteen cores, and supported both ECC memory up to 128GB and 10GBase-T on a single bit of silicon for under 45W. When it came out, it was amazing all this was on a single chip, compared to the quad-core parts in the consumer market. Xeon D ended up having a lot of uses for networking, storage, management, and dense server installations. How and when Intel would be updating this product line has been somewhat of a mystery.
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My thoughts
It took years to get Xeon D shipping in a mature form. For example, the initial Xeon D-1540 was quickly replaced by the Xeon D-1541, then joined by a lot of other shapes and sizes in 2016. There have certainly been bumps in the road, but it's been a great experience overall, especially for the hundreds of TinkerTry'd Supermicro SuperServer Bundle owners out there, which I'm very grateful for.
Based on how long things took last time around, I suspect it will easily be well into 3rd quarter of 2018 before companies like Supermicro have products shipping in volume that are based on Skylake-D. Worth noting that the higher core counts with higher TDP/watts mean these aren't going to work in the tiny 1U chassis that made the SYS-E200-8D and SYS-E300 so popular, for folks more interested in portability than quiet computing. Their CSE-101F and CSE-E300 chassis only offer 60 or 80 watt power bricks.
As for whether Supermicro will come out with a Skylake-D Mini ITX motherboard paired with their popular mini tower form factor, I don't know, but I sure hope so. It does seem that all but the 18 core Skylake-D could possibly use the existing CSE-721TQ-250B chassis that the SYS-5028D-TN4T SuperServers uses, given its 250 watt design. Note that at least one guy already runs 16 Xeon cores in it.
I would hope Supermicro gets much more adventuresome than that though, with more M.2 slots, for all those increasingly affordable NVMe SSDs, or at least a full height PCIe slot to fit promising M.2 x 4 devices like the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Card.
Even better would be for many big server vendors like Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo to offer compact and quiet mini towers suited for home virtualization lab, in a variety of Skylake-D core counts/price points. One can always hope. See also Patrick Kennedy's highlighted comments below.
It will be an interesting year, and I'm very glad Intel continues to invest in compact SoC designs!
Feb 02 2018 Update
This article's title has been updated, to reflect that the Skylake-D is really a higher-end product than Xeon D (Broadwell-DE), Patrick explains here:
- Intel Xeon D-2100 Series Skylake-D Platform Initial OS Compatibility Matrix
Feb 02 2018 by Patrick Kennedy at STH...
We do want to point out that Skylake-D and Broadwell-DE are going to operate in different segments. Some of the pre-release reporting makes it sound as though they are going to be direct replacements. Without getting into too many specifics, the new Skylake-D chips will occupy a space above Broadwell-DE in terms of price, performance, power consumption, TDP, and RAM capacity.
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Feb 11 2018 Update
See newer article:
See also at TinkerTry
- Intel Xeon D-1500 crams incredible virtualization lab specs into tiny mITX size, codename Broadwell-DE
Mar 09 2015
See also
I honestly hadn't come across the below articles until today, with this Google search for "Skylake D".
- Intel Confirms Skylake Xeon D in Early 2018
Nov 27 2017 by Patrick Kennedy at STH...
Intel is confirming the Skylake based Xeon D CPU in early 2018. We take “early” to mean that we will see the new Skylake Xeon D SoC in Q1 2018.
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Why Intel needs a Skylake Xeon D update
We have heard it suggested that the 16 core Atom C3955 is the replacement, but this is not the case. Intel needs the Skylake Xeon D part to have a unified ISA between its mainstream Xeon and SoC products. That allows for things like live migrations of VMs. More importantly, it also allows companies to optimize binaries for caches and instruction sets and run them across embedded and mainstream servers. ... by not simply stating Q1 2018, Intel leaves itself room for additional schedule slip which has become common on embedded parts. For example, the Intel Atom C3000 series codenamed “Denverton” was pushed almost a year ...
- Intel to Update Xeon D in Early 2018, with Skylake-SP Cores
Nov 29 2017 by Ian Cutress at AnandTechOne of the interesting sub-announcements to come out of Intel’s EPYC benchmark numbers was a slide on the ‘momentum’ of Intel’s new Xeon Scalable Platform using Skylake-SP cores. Alongside the notice of ‘110+ performance world records’ and ‘200 OEM systems shipping’ was a side note on the next iteration of Xeon-D, which will be getting the latest enterprise Skylake-SP cores.
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