Intel held a reveal event today announcing a bunch of stuff, but the most important one, I think, is Optane DCPMM.
Anandtech roundup article is here. I’m going to bed, sorry for a bare bones post.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14155/intels-enterprise-extravaganza-2019-roundup
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Kinda lame, lol:
Optane doesn’t replace DDR4 entirely – you need at least one module of standard DDR4 in the system to get it to work
Rather would of had it with no ddr4 module. But it looks important so I’m glad they went this way :p. I do like DCPMM tho, it looks cool on paper
With Optane DCPMM in a system, it can be used in two modes: Memory Mode and App Direct.
The first mode is the simplest mode to think about it: as DRAM. The system will see the large DRAM allocation, but in reality it will use the Optane DCPMM as the main memory store and the DDR4 as a buffer to it. If the buffer contains the data needed straight away, it makes for a standard DRAM fast read/write, while if it is in the Optane, it is slightly slower. How this is negotiated is between the DDR4 controller and the Optane DCPMM controller on the module, but this ultimately works great for large DRAM installations, rather than keeping everything in slower NVMe.
The second mode is App Direct. In this instance, the DRAM acts like a big storage drive that is as fast as a RAM Disk. This disk, while not bootable, will keep the data stored on it between startups (an advantage of the memory being persistent), enabling very quick restarts to avoid serious downtime. App Direct mode is a little more esoteric than ‘just a big amount of DRAM’, as developers may have to re-architect their software stack in order to take advantage of the DRAM-like speeds this disk will enable. It’s essentially a big RAM Disk that holds its data. ( ed: I’ll take two )
Luckily the 8280L is only 17906… if it was 17910 or higher I wouldn’t be able to afford it.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14146/intel-xeon-scalable-cascade-lake-deep-dive-now-with-optane
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56 Cores 112 Threads, glued™ together dies, 3.8ghz, 400w…
That’s the big chip, all STILL on 14nm, fun!
THICC!
Also in typical Intel style, more than 50 SKUs, all aimed at specific tasks rather than general use. More segments than a factory full of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/intel_xeon_second_gen_launch/
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GLUED??? ErMAGERD ONLY AMD GLUEZ CPUZ!!!
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50 SKU’s… jesus… that’s just insane. I can only imagine purchasers going AMD just for simplicity. When you are spending 5 figures for box (or boxes) last thing you want to do is get confused and order the wrong CPU missing a feature you need.
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It is crazy but this is where the innovation goes in Intel these days I think, how to make more segments. Jokes aside it is just what they do and it is insane, it used to just be shotgunning parts out but now it is that and all the pellets are slightly different colours too! They have some for long life, other for networking and others still for VMs.
Intel still have a strangle hold on servers but AMD are making headlines with the prices and performance so this will be interesting. Wether people buying them see AMDs “general use” stuff as better or buy into the “optimised for X” thing will be interesting it sounds like intel just want to sell a bunch of the same stuff over and over with slight tweaks but I know nothing about the reality.
It would be really interesting to see if two of their similar parts that are supposed to be optimised for different tasks actually preform better in those tasks compared to each other, but then this server stuff does bit get the same benchmarking the gamer/enthusiast stuff does. But it does lend its self even more to the missing a feature problem you mentioned, that was an issue anyway before with all their screwing around with extensions and features, now they might also be worse at specific tasks if picked wrong.
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This is a giant monolithic corporation that can’t change. It is going to take a few years for AMD to really entrench with these product lines… but the momentum is building.
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400W TDP is a big OOF
That will be one 1.2kW PSU per 2 sockets without RAM, drives or PCIe devices.
Intel should partner with MaxPlanck to heat up their fusion experiments.
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Pfft. 5 figures for the entire box, puhlease…
This is intel
5 figures for the processor.
xx,000 USD
Most interesting thing to me out of all that was the new FPGAs
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Not all SKU’s are 5 figures. 
No but the headline 56 core CPU will be. Guaranteed.