Intel’s ‘Skylake Purley’ Family of Microprocessors Will Boast upto 28 Cores and 56 Threads – Next Generation Xeon Platform Landing in 2016

We originally revealed details about the Skylake Purley platform a couple of months ago. While that covered almost everything (given it was an Intel Press Deck that was leaked) the exact core count was at that time, not entirely confirmed. Recent reports (from EXPReview.com) reveal that the highly hush-hush platform from Intel will rock 28 full fledged Skylake cores and upto 56 threads with hyper threading. The Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 will be getting some pretty interesting updates soon.

Biggest advancement from Intel since Nehalem, Skylake Purley will boast upto 28 full fledged cores

The Skylake Purley platform will be divided between three major categories 2S, 4S and 8S/8S+. This includes the family range from Xeon E5 to Xeon E7. The expected nomenclature should assume the ‘v5’ suffix thanks to the Skylake microarchitecture present in the processors and include the lineups of Xeon E5 2600 v5, Xeon E5 4600 v5, Xeon E7 4800 v5 and Xeon E7 8800 v5. The E5 family includes the dual socket and quad socket designs (2S and 4S) whileas the E7 family includes the 8 socket design structure with the C602 chipset and a scalable memory buffer.

One of the biggest advancements that Skylake will have is the Intel Omnipath Architecture integration which will be called Storm Lake (Generation 1). The PCH will be codenamed Lewisburg while as it will also ship with updated Ethernet controllers. Another very important point to note is that the platform will be scalable up to 8 Sockets – which is frankly an absolutely insane amount for CPUs working in tandem in any given configuration. Specific SKUs have not been disclosed at this time. Since we already have in our possession the complete slide deck of this platform, I have taken the liberty to post the important bits here:

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Skylake EX Purley will be spread out amongst the entire scalable segment – unlike the previous iterations. The TDP will be configurable from 45W to 165W and will require Socket P. Another interesting point to note is the fact that not only will Purley update the number of PCIe slots to 48 but they will finally be configurable in x4, x8 and x16 divisions ( a major update). Previous reports had hinted on Intel working on some secret project that will prove Skylake to be quite a big architectural jump and not simply another Harwell. While we haven’t seen any evidence of this revolutionary change on the mainstream side – Skylake Purley does appear to be the aforementioned jump, incarnate.

According to Intel’s own slides, Skylake Purley is poised to be the biggest update since the age old Nehalem platform. Along with the improved performance per watt that comes with every article iteration, Skylake EX Purley will actually ship with 6 Channels of DDR4 as opposed to 4. It will also include the AVX 512 instruction set and will boast the 100G OmniPath interconnect. Skylake Purley will also have Cannonlake graphics support not to mention FPGA integration (another important upgrade).

The FPGA will be able to execute programmable logic as opposed to the Skylake processor. The amount of flexibility offered by an integrated FPGA solution will ofcourse be unparalleled ( in the work loads where it is actually effective). It will also allow Intel to gain an incredible amount of edge over any competition and I am sure they charge the price premium for it. As I mentioned in the Xeon roadmap published just sometime back (at the time of writing) we have no word currently on the exact time frame – but it is expected that we will see the platform sometime in 2016.