The chip giant Intel is working hard after AMD‘s Ryzen and EPYC series CPUs gained massive attention, as well as Apple‘s movement to ARM-based silicon. The company has made some new exciting announcements for its Xeon line-up and more.
New Xeon chips unveiled
On 18th February, Intel had shared its plans for new Xeon processors for high performance and high core density for latency-tolerant workloads, named as P-Core and E-Core series respectively. The new announcement brings Xeon D-1700 and D-2700 enterprise CPUs.
Xeon D-1700 has 4-10 cores and D-2700 4-20 cores. The CPUs are scalable; core counts are defined by software. Intel promises a big performance jump with those new CPUs. However, there are no words about the E-Cores and P-Cores, and the payment model for the software-defined silicon.
The chip giant looks like trying to revive the Ultrabook concept to compete with M1 powered Macbooks
Thinner and lighter laptops, once more
Intel’s Ultrabook concept didn’t live long but brought a new vision in the laptop industry. However, Apple’s success with M1 chips outshines every x86 based laptop. Now Intel wants to improve its position with the vPro Evo series laptops. The new series will aim for thinner and lighter laptops with the introduction of Alder Lake U series CPUs.
The final products will have WiFi 6e, PCIe 3/4, Thunderbolt 4, and Gigabit ethernet. 35 vPro Evo products will be available this year. It looks like the company is trying to achieve Ultrabook v2.0 with the help of the combination of E-Cores and P-Cores on Alder Lake CPUs.
Acquistation of Linutronix
Intel has also acquired German company Linutronix; the company behind PREEMPT_RT. There is no word about the financial side of the acquisition. PREEMPT_RT is an old Linux project and it is used for creating a low-latency communication between components of a system, such as sensors, robots, and controllers.
It alters how the kernel handles the tasks and it is used on Linux-based industrial systems. The contribution to the project is not enough; so full integration to the Linux kernel has not happened yet. With the acquisition, the project will surely accelerate with the almost-unlimited resources of Intel.