Sierra Forest is possibly Intel’s most needed architecture in recent times with permission from Meteor Lake. Although it will be the last company to get into the realm of efficiency as such, it will do so quite brilliantly, and quite possibly outperforming much of its rivals. Intel Sierra Forest is the three-way bet to deal heavy blows to its rivals, that is, Ampere, Apple and AMD, the triple AAA as they are usually called. And it is that Sierra Forest will have up to 144 Corescan Intel compete with the rest?
It is a commitment to efficiency and contained energy consumption, and precisely, although it may not seem like it, that “content” must be put in quotes, because Sierra Forest is the version intended for data centers, and therefore, even having all E-Cores to his credit, he seeks to maximize the number of Cores and with this he will trigger consumption.
Intel Sierra Forest confirms suspicions: 144 Cores as maximum configuration
Intel Xeon SierraForest A0： Q3PB 96Core – 72MB L3 – 350w Q3PD 144Core – 108MB L3 – 350w
🫠🫠🫠— 结城安穗-YuuKi_AnS🍥 (@yuuki_ans) August 16, 2023
The leak reveals two of the options that we will have available, where in both cases they are already in the A0 version, that is, there are samples of the chips manufactured in volume as such. Two aspects come to us today:
- Q3PB with 96 cores – 72MB L3 – 350W
- Q3PD with 144 cores – 108MB L3 – 350W
We don’t know the Q3Px terminologies, they can be specific configurations or simply the type of encapsulation they will have. The important thing is the rest of the data, since the fastest version will have those 144 Cores to his credit, with no less than 108MB of L3 and a consumption of 350 watts.
This gives us 1.33 MB of L3 for each of them and a ratio of 0.411 watts per corewhich is pretty impressive.
To get this power density data Intel has used its new Intel3 node with Gles Core microarchitecturea slightly more advanced version than crestmont for its E-Core, the same in this last point as the current Raptor Lake, only with a better node.
Best of all, if it ends up being fulfilled, is that Intel would have kept the cache L2 in Sierra Forest, so the 144 Cores version would have no less than 144 MB, since each cluster of 4 Cores Gles gets 4MB of L2. In summary, 1.33 MB of L3 and 1 MB of L2 per core.
The war for performance and efficiency: Apple vs Ampere vs AMD vs Intel
Here we must launch comparisons, knowing that the frequencies and the IPC jump remain to be known. But what we can already anticipate is that the version of 144 Cores it will be 10 watts lower in consumption than the EPYC 9754besides, with 16 more Coresalthough they will have less than half the L3 available than Bergamo like architecture.
On the other hand, only a few months ago Ampere presented its Ampere Onea CPU with 192 Cores based on Armv8.6+which is equipped with 2 MB of L2 per Core, 64 MB of L3 and up to 350 watts of consumption.
As we can see, the efficiency sector based on E-Core cores in general is in style, and as we saw a few days ago with the announced death of Intel’s Hyper Threading to make way for E-Cores and other news, this It will not do more than strengthen itself, because consumption is going up and in our sector the ceiling has been reached, it was time to innovate.
As for Apple and to close this article, its M3 Ultra, currently in desEsports Extraswith the latest technology apple fusion It will say how far the bitten apple is in this segment, the professional, which is really interesting.
