Intel's Data Center Event Live Blog (8:30am PT)

11:34AM EDT - I'm here with Anton ready for the live blog

11:35AM EDT - Today Intel is running an event announcing the latest developments in their data center business. We're ready to live blog the registration-only event, and expect to see Navin Shenoy, Intel’s EVP and GM of the Data Center Group (DCG), and Lisa Spelman, DCG’s VP of Products and Marketing on stage.

11:35AM EDT - It's a registration-only event, but it is a webcast

11:37AM EDT - All info for the webcast is here: https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/cloud-computing/overview.html

11:37AM EDT - But it seems to be a little slow in starting anyway...

11:40AM EDT - It begins - they hired a singer to start it at the webcast

11:40AM EDT - Video showing where Intel is used

11:40AM EDT - 'Is your infrastructure ready?'

11:40AM EDT - Navin Shenoy to the stage

11:41AM EDT - 'Today is my first Xeon Platform Launch'

11:41AM EDT - 'Today Intel is bringing the biggest DC advancement in a decade'

11:41AM EDT - 'Breakthrough perfomance, unmatched security'

11:41AM EDT - 'Cloud and network services, to new workloads like automotive and AI'

11:42AM EDT - 'Cloud Companies take new features for their core advantage'

11:42AM EDT - 'Turning to technology for differentiated products is accelerating faster than ever'

11:43AM EDT - 'The increases challenge in farming and retail, usign sensors and analytics'

11:43AM EDT - Three main trends in the industry: Cloud, AI/Analytics, and 5G

11:44AM EDT - 'We're headed towards a hybrid cloud end-state'

11:44AM EDT - e.g. Public cloud and private cloud

11:44AM EDT - Xeons into cloud infrastructure has doubled

11:45AM EDT - 'The rise of AI/Analytics is well documented'

11:45AM EDT - 'Massive amounts of data, but less than 1% generated is actually used/analyzed = opportunity to unlock the value of that data'

11:45AM EDT - '5G is more than a wireless netowrk'

11:46AM EDT - 'It's about connecting what previously wasn't connected, like parking meters etc'

11:46AM EDT - 'The amount of sensors that could be deployed would overwhelm any network as it stands'

11:47AM EDT - 'We need a network that deploys intelligence for infrastucture'

11:47AM EDT - 'Cloud service will need to think about how they deploy performance and security across their infrastructure and will require network agility'

11:48AM EDT - 'DC technology must transform on the inside to deliver what businesses need'

11:48AM EDT - Latest Addition to Intel DC: The Intel Scalable Platform

11:48AM EDT - CPU on stage

11:48AM EDT - Rearchitected CPU, designed from the ground up

11:49AM EDT - 'Industry highest perf/watt platform, designed for hybrid cloud'

11:49AM EDT - 'Revolutionary leap forward'

11:49AM EDT - 'Includes big perf advances in deep learning'

11:50AM EDT - 'Up to 1.65x perf over last generation'

11:50AM EDT - 'This is our gen-on-gen performance improvement in a decade'

11:50AM EDT - '50% more memory bandwidth'

11:50AM EDT - (He said 50% more PCIe.... ?)

11:51AM EDT - 4x perf on VM throughput over a 4yr old server

11:51AM EDT - 65% lower TCO

11:51AM EDT - 5 year development cycle for this CPU

11:52AM EDT - 'no-one knows how to take advantage of this new technology more than the communications industry'

11:53AM EDT - AT&T to the stage

11:54AM EDT - The new technology means a lot to us

11:55AM EDT - 'We need to deploy in weeks - we got the processors in March: we've seen a 30% perfomance improvement already'

11:56AM EDT - 'Software defined networking allows us to evolve at a faster pace

11:58AM EDT - 'high speed, low-latency: real-time compute coming to the edge'

11:59AM EDT - 'We can transform the latest, but also the legacy'

11:59AM EDT - 'Big companies like AT&T are already taking advantage'

11:59AM EDT - Lisa Spelman, VP Xeon to the stage

12:00PM EDT - 'You have to understand the infrastructure requirements'

12:00PM EDT - 'customers want to accelerate their own growth while adjusting to the landscape - regardless of industry'

12:01PM EDT - 'scalable performance is required'

12:01PM EDT - AVX-512, Mesh, QAT

12:02PM EDT - 'AVX-512 makes vector computation easier'

12:03PM EDT - QAT is borne from network workload requirements

12:03PM EDT - 'QAT gives good speedups for security algorithms as well'

12:03PM EDT - '100 Gb/s of crypto and compression'

12:04PM EDT - Now the mesh

12:04PM EDT - 'optimizes data sharing between cores'

12:04PM EDT - Discussing Ring vs Mesh

12:05PM EDT - 'Rings would not scale beyond the number of cores our customers needed'

12:05PM EDT - 'A real data center CPU needs to talk to all memory all the time, and the mesh helps that'

12:06PM EDT - 'It's one thing to add cores, but another to deliver a well balanced system'

12:06PM EDT - '58 new performance world records and counting'

12:06PM EDT - Showing Cisco, DellEMC, Fujitsu, Huawei etc

12:07PM EDT - 'Benchmarks aren't real workloads'

12:07PM EDT - errr

12:08PM EDT - Data minings, simulations, forecasting etc

12:09PM EDT - 'Our customers have an insatiable demand for compute'

12:10PM EDT - Top500 systems already announced

12:10PM EDT - 'Starting from November last year, we've sold 500k+ units already'

12:10PM EDT - ...I thought today was the launch

12:10PM EDT - Google deployment story

12:11PM EDT - Tried to deploy in November

12:11PM EDT - End of a multi-year collaboration between Intel and Google on the microarchitecture based on their network requirements

12:11PM EDT - Video about Google now

12:12PM EDT - 'up to 40% perf improvement, more than 100% perf using tuned AVX-512'

12:13PM EDT - First time, 2S, 4S and 8S socket CPUs launched at the same time

12:13PM EDT - 450+ systems planned

12:13PM EDT - Across cloud, network, storage and fabric

12:13PM EDT - Xeon with OmniPath as well

12:14PM EDT - Encryption overhead: 0.37% overhead

12:14PM EDT - Achieved through AES-NI and AVX-512

12:15PM EDT - From boot to BIOS, to VMs, hardware security is built in

12:16PM EDT - Now blockchains

12:16PM EDT - 'Emerging in a few industry consortia'

12:16PM EDT - 'eliminates the need for a central authority'

12:16PM EDT - Relies on comprehensive encryption

12:17PM EDT - Participating in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

12:17PM EDT - New collaboration with r3 with Xeon-Scalable

12:17PM EDT - Xeon-SP is seen as the foundation of a blockchain platform

12:18PM EDT - Peter Marsden from Thomson Reuters to the stage

12:18PM EDT - 'Driving data through the financial industry'

12:19PM EDT - 'We now see millions of transactions every second'

12:19PM EDT - 'Increase in the data, increase in the analytics'

12:19PM EDT - 'TR is key to that industry for flow and analytics'

12:20PM EDT - 'Our Velocity Analytics performs 2x with the new Intel platform'

12:20PM EDT - 'Using Xeon-SP mainly for performance, but also investing in Optane and storage'

12:21PM EDT - 'Back in 2002, we had 75k/sec messages in our system. Now we have 25 million/sec'

12:21PM EDT - 'We need fewer cores for the same benefit'

12:21PM EDT - Now talking about data latency using the Mesh

12:22PM EDT - That's a shot at AMD's EPYC

12:22PM EDT - We just posted our EPYC vs Skylake-SP review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade

12:23PM EDT - 'Longer term, we're seeing more work on cloud native implementations'

12:24PM EDT - Now on to 'Agility': RAS Features, Virtualization, Optane, and AI/Deep Learning

12:24PM EDT - 'Reducing the overhead of VM migration'

12:24PM EDT - 'Hypervisors need to enforce integrity of VMs and data'

12:25PM EDT - RAS supported in 2/4/8 and above socket configurations

12:25PM EDT - Intel Volume Management Device: Optane SSDs, supporting NVMe Hot Plug

12:25PM EDT - Xeon can do training and inference

12:25PM EDT - 'at scale'

12:26PM EDT - Up to 113x perf vs Xeon v3 (3yr old code) when tuned for training

12:27PM EDT - AWS inference and training performance up to 100x

12:28PM EDT - Now a healthcare provider

12:29PM EDT - 'we migrated into risk-based analytics'

12:30PM EDT - 'In the future, systems are fundamentally information management: they need to store, sort and analyze large amounts of data for analytics'

12:30PM EDT - 'Significant difference between Human Analytics vs Computer Analytics'

12:31PM EDT - 'If you can get parallel processing, you can take on board multiples of data'

12:33PM EDT - 'Combination of Scalable Processors and our systems means we can analyze more at a lower cost, so we can approach new clinical challenges we couldn't before'

12:35PM EDT - Now onto infrastructure

12:35PM EDT - 'Time and money spent on optimal configurations is a barrier to speedy deployment'

12:35PM EDT - 'Unveiling the Intel Select Solution: workload-optimized reference platforms'

12:36PM EDT - 'Allows data centers and customers to deploy quickly'

12:36PM EDT - 3 initial offerings: VMware vSAN, Microsoft SQL, and [went to quick]

12:36PM EDT - *too

12:37PM EDT - Here's a wafer

12:37PM EDT - 20 wide, 8 tall ?

12:38PM EDT - 13 x 9 actually

12:38PM EDT - That seems to be a wrap for the main discussion

12:38PM EDT - We already posted our Skylake-SP vs EPYC review, it's worth a read: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade