288 E-Cores, Hold The Hyper-Threading
Intel’s Clearwater Forest looks to be a very impressive upgrade to Intel’s server chips. It will be built on their 18A process and will replace the aging FinFET design with RibbonFET. With RibbonFET the transistor gate is wrapped around the channel, and hose channels can be of different widths which should have a positive effect on efficiency. In addition to the new gate technology Intel’s new backside power solution called PowerVIA will also increase efficiency, cell density and should even allow slightly higher frequencies.
These Xeon chips are still a ways out, the next generation will be Sierra Forest and that will scale all the way up to 288 E-Cores. Intel has excluded P-Cores from these server chips in order to provide massive amounts of cores without causing your server room to burst into fire. The high core counts mean that they don’t need to depend on Hyper-Threading, which can cause server loads to run slower than they otherwise should.
