Intel’s High-End Cascade Lake CPUs to Support 3.84 TB of Memory per Socket

Optane is almost entirely hype, with no substance.

Data center admins are going to be able to get the capitol for real DDR4 over Optane. They'd need to be ordering a lot of servers before the price point becomes significant enough that they'd order an Optane configuration and decide to benchmark them.

I'd be curious about the real benchmarking at that point. It there a performance boost to simply have more memory, even if some of it is Optane, or is it better to have a lower capacity without the Optane sticks? I have a feeling this will vary heavily by application too.

And the reason for that is because their chips/products don't improve as much every year, and Intel is becoming more desperate each year as it faces more competition from Arm, and now AMD, too. So it's trying to "make-up the difference" by being more misleading about it. It's not just the competition either, but the fact that Intel needs to make it sound like their next-gen chips "are so much better" than last year, and make you buy the new ones, too.

I'll give an analogy. Let's say a year ago Intel's CPU got an IPC boost of 10%. But this year it's only getting a 5% boost. Intel will either increase power consumption of the chip to get that 10% or will increase boost speed while keeping the base clock speed the same or lower it for the next-gen chip, just so it can say "the peak performance is once again +10% for this new generation!".

Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and whatever Lake is coming next that isn't on 10nm all suffer from this kind of thinking. It's the same kind of thinking that created the whole scandal with the 28-core "5GHz chip". Intel's marketing is all about creating the perception that their chips are significantly better than the last generation. It's why they now have "Xeon Gold", too.

At this point I wouldn't trust any of Intel's announcements until they are verified by trustworthy parties (of which there are only a handful, because most don't go deep enough into their reviews to actually spot what Intel has done to their products to mislead customers).

"What Platform Did It Run On? Intel did not answer this platform directly, however it was clear that the CPU was aimed at the LGA3647 server-based socket given from our examination of the demo system. It was unclear how Intel was going to promote this as an extreme workstation-type system, however Intel did note that they expect only a select market to be interested in this type of processor: a niche of a niche."

And, with high core counts, we can start playing with things like dedicating cores (and their L1 caches) to single tasks, kind of specializing them as we do with mainframes.

But that hasn't stopped anyone because when talking about computers and data storage, unless you got some wacky old russian terenary system running in some bunker, everything should always be expressed using a base 2 system.

In most other areas of engineering where there is still some concept of liability, the process is: validation first, save hot-rodding for v2. CPU industry is largely unencumbered by liability, driven by specious benchmarks, and has no use for that process.