[The Exiled]

Intel Goes For 48-Cores: Cascade-AP with Multi-Chip Package Coming Soon

Ahead of the annual Supercomputing 2018 conference next week, Intel is today announcing part of its upcoming Cascade Lake strategy. Today’s announcement is for a product family to run alongside Cascade Lake-SP, called Cascade Lake-AP, or Cascade-AP for short. Cascade-AP is going to be aimed at "advanced performance". In order to implement this new processor family, Intel is combining multiple chips in the same package. Cascade-AP processors will be up to 48 cores, possibly with hyperthreading, and is aimed at dual socket servers, for a total of 96 cores in a 2S system. As a result, a single Cascade-AP is essentially a 2S Xeon setup on a single chip. Each Cascade-AP processor will have 12 DDR4 DRAM channels, although maximum capacity of memory has not been announced.

Each Cascade-AP lake processor will offer up to 48 cores, and in order to do this Intel is using a multi-chip package (MCP). At this point we believe that Intel is using two silicon dies in the package, specifically two XCC dies which should be 28-core by design but will be only enabled up to 24-core per silicon die. Intel did confirm that these dies are connected by UPI over the package, and not with Intel’s EMIB technology. Given the extra power requirements and extra memory requirements, we fully expect Intel to be using a new socket for this processor. Rather than LGA-4367, with 4367-pins, there have been recent leaks suggesting that an LGA-5903 socket be where Cascade-AP will end up, although Intel has not confirmed this. Intel did state that Cascade-AP will be shipping for revenue in Q3 2018 to its high-profile customers as part of its early access program, however widespread availability will be ‘in the first part of 2019.

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