Intel 5th Gen Xeon, Emerald Rapids, Features Dual-Chiplet Layout, More Cache, More Expensive Than Sapphire Rapids

Intel's 5th Gen Xeon lineup codenamed Emerald Rapids launches later this year and we have a detailed analysis of the family done by SemiAnalysis.

Intel recently announced that its 5th Gen Xeon family codenamed Emerald Rapids, will feature high-quality silicon, higher performance per watt in the same power envelope, increased gen-on-gen core densities, and will be compatible with the same platform as the 4th Gen Xeon chips. The lineup is sampling today and scheduled for delivery in Q4 2023.

Intel also gave a first look at the actual silicon which cut down on the monolithic design from the previous gen. While Sapphire Rapids features a quad-chiplet design, Emerald Rapids was shown to utilize two bigger chiplets. Now, Semianalysis has provided an in-depth look at what the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable family has to offer and whether this new design is more cost-effective or not when compared to Sapphire Rapids.

One of the first similarities between the Emerald Rapids and Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs is that they utilize the same LGA-4677 socket. What sets the two apart is that the new Emerald Rapid server processors will offer an increased performance through larger on-die caches.

Emerald Rapids is expected to make use of the Raptor Cove core architecture which is an optimized variant of the Golden Cove core that will deliver 5-10% IPC improvement over Golden Cove cores. It will also pack up to 64 cores &  128 threads which is a small core bump over the 56 cores and 112 threads featured on Sapphire Rapids chips.

In its breakdown, the Intel Emerald Rapids XCC core was used for comparison which should feature a total of 66 on-die cores of which 64 cores will be enabled on the top SKU so that's 33 cores per die. Each core will feature 2 MB of L2 cache and 5 MB of L3 cache. The L3 cache gets a 2.66x boost over Sapphire Rapids which offers 1.875 MB L3 cache per Golden Cove core.

The Intel 7 process will be the basis of the Emerald Rapids series, which uses the 10nm Enhanced SuperFin, & is expected to have some improvements to the architecture to increase performance.

The new Emerald Rapids Xeon series produces up to four 20 GT/s UPI links for inter-socket data transmission. There is a forty-eight-lane PCIe 5.0 root complex with forty wired, totaling 80 lanes in full, which is identical to Sapphire Rapids. The memory interface remains unchanged, but Emerald Rapids will offer an eight-channel DDR5 interface with increased speeds of 5600 Mbps.

It is estimated by Semianalysis that the total dual-chip area of Intel's 5th Gen Emerald Rapids Xeon CPUs won't be that different compared to Sapphire Rapids, measuring around 1493mm2 (vs 1510 mm2).

Semi Analysis states that Emerald Rapids will cost more than Sapphire Rapids to manufacture and that might end up being a problem competing against ramped-up AMD's Genoa & Genoa-X chips (debut expected this quarter). The new Emerald Rapids series should appear in the third quarter of this year.

News Sources: TechPowerUP, Semi Analysis