Successor to Intel's popular and home-lab-friendly Xeon D-1500 is Xeon D-1600, announced today

Posted by Paul Braren on Apr 2 2019 (updated on Apr 30 2019) in

Article published 1:12pm ET

Intel-Datacenter-Porfolio-2019-04-02 — Positioning.

Longtime readers of TinkerTry may recall that Xeon D was first announced back in February of 2015, see

Intel Xeon D-1500 crams incredible virtualization lab specs into tiny mITX size, codename Broadwell-DE
Mar 09 2015

Last month, this news broke:

xeon-d-1500-successor-is-called-hewitt-lake

Successor to Intel's home lab friendly Xeon D-1500 is called Hewitt Lake
Mar 04 2019

Intel-Xeon-D-1600-image-from-Intel-Newsroom-2019-04-02--TinkerTry — Image from Intel Newsroom.

Today, Intel's Datacentric-themed presentation broke the exact name of the successor to the wildly successful Xeon D-1500: it's dubbed Xeon D-1600! Simple, easy to remember, I'm fond of the name already. It's name's debut was part of the same livestream where the next generation of Intel Scalable processors were also announced, along with some other surprises.

They haven't even covered it yet in this live event, but wanted to get this article and livestream link:

https://intel.ly/2OEhHnD

out to you as soon as possible, so you can watch live along with me!

Video

Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day [Keynote Replay]

Intel-Navin-Shenoy-Intel-Xeon-1 — Intel's Navin Shenoy, with Xeon wafer.

Apr 02 2016 05:15pm ET Update

TinkerTry's Take

Unfortunately, Xeon D-1600 is still a 14nm chip, so innovation on the heat and noise and power fronts are modest. ~~You do move from 128GB max to 512GB max, a capability that arose on last year's more costly Xeon D-2100 line. Whether home labs can afford such RAM densities is another matter.~~ Correction - the maximum RAM capacity for Xeon D-1600 is the same as Xeon D-1500, 128GB of RAM. This is disappointing.

You do also get 4 10G interfaces instead of 2, and night GHz too, explained in more detail at STH here, which also mentions:

Intel expects the new Intel Xeon D-1600 to ship this quarter in Q2 2019. We think that is reasonable since this is largely a tweak from existing Broadwell-DE.

STH explains how the Xeon D-1600 is well positioned to fill the gap between Xeon D-1500 and Xeon D-2100, I suppose I'm just a little less patient with waiting for 10nm for selfish reasons, for myself and for my readers. Fanless chassis designs with lots of cores based on a 10nm CPUs suited for home office desks would be fantastic, or is that fan(less)tastic?

ThinkSystem SE350 edge server — Introducing the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350

Dimension1 — Introducing Project Dimension

One harbinger of good 10nm things to come is the new Agilex getting blessed with 10nm goodness. So it appears 10nm will finally be landing across more products soon, but it's years later than originally anticipated, and like many folks who ask me about AMD EPYC viability, with patience wearing a bit thin.

Let's hope the industry push to IoT, along with software like VMware's Project Dimension, help fuel the market and incent Intel to dedicate vast sums of money needed for CPU process change across their Xeon line, including Xeon D. Meanwhile, see also Lenovo's new Xeon D-2100 based offering, the ThinkSystem SE350.

Also noteworthy is the absence of support for Intel Optane DC persistent memory. That's one of the core features/selling point/differentiators for the 2nd-Gen Xeon Scalable processor. Not surprising, a business reality.

Finally, it's a bit strange that this line only goes up to 8 cores, not the 16 cores Xeon D-1500 reached in that Xeon D-1587, seen in my Intel ARK screenshots and links from back in 2017 here. That there feels a bit like an upsell to Xeon D-2100, but again, STH's details the product positioning and reasoning rather nicely.

From Intel Newsroom:

Targeting computing at the edge, security and storage solutions, Intel unveiled the Intel Xeon D-1600 processor, a highly-integrated system-on-chip (SoC) designed for dense environments where power and space are limited, but per-core performance is essential. The next-generation SoC helps advance customers down the path to 5G and extend Intel’s solutions to the intelligent edge.

From Intel Fact Sheet:

Edge-Computing SoCs
Intel® Xeon® D-1600 processors – High-Density SoC Processors for Intelligent Edge

Intel Xeon D-1600 processors are highly integrated SoC processors designed for dense environments where power and space are limited, but per-core performance is essential. Combined with built-in Intel® QuickAssist technology and Intel® Virtualization technology, Intel Xeon D-1600 processors deliver new levels of workload-optimized performance and hardware-enhanced security benefits for virtualized network functions (VNFs), control plane and mid-range storage solutions. Intel Xeon D-1600 processors feature up to 8 cores.

Intel-ARK-Xeon-D-1600-table-sort-by-release-date-2019-04-02--TinkerTry — Intel ARK, view of all Xeon D-1600 just launched, 2 cores to 8 cores.

Apr 03 2016 02:00pm ET Update

I'm delighted that I managed to get the Xeon D-1600 Processors deck from Intel today, and I'm able to share with you, my valued readers. It's got a lot more of the nerdy details for you to enjoy, have at it! I've also created a screenshot of it for you to scroll through right here below, if PDF viewers just aren't your thing.