In the past few weeks Intel has been very busy working on the upcoming desktop Broadwell processors and the next Skylake generation, expected this fall, but this is not everything – we will also get to see server Skylake processors a bit later in the so-called Purley platform.
It is exactly this platform that Intel has detailed at an event, dedicated to future Intel server processors. According to the information shared Skylake will be a very scalable chip – the server versions of this architecture will be able to offer up to 14 processing cores with Hyper-Threading technology in a single chip and support for six-channeled DDR4 memory. The Purley platform will be powered by Intel Skylake-EP and Skylake-EX processors and these chips on their own will be assisted by a new chipset called Lewisburg. Purley will be able to run RDIMM and LRDIMM memory modules at up to 2667 MHz and the chips themselves will sit in a new socket, called socket P. Thus Intel will unify all its server chips under one cap and will house them in a single socket. In addition the new chips will feature TDP of 45-165W and will use a new UPI interface that will retire the current QPI interface. Lewisburg on its own will also expand the number of PCI-E lanes to 48, a number, which can then be split into x4, x8 and x16 connections. In addition to them the Lewisburg core logic will provide 20 more lanes. The future server Skylake chips will feature the latest 14 nm tech process and will also support AVX-512 (AVX3), which is a new instruction set that will accelerate floating point calculations.
The Purley platform is expected no earlier than 2017 but until then we may also see additional changes – it remains to be seen if they will be for the better or the worse.
Source: Intel