As the upcoming Intel Cascade Lake-SP server processors are getting closer to their official release date (which my sources tell me is April 2, 2019), some more specifications are starting to leak out. <\/span><\/p>\n Not directly from Intel, but from their system integrator partners, in this case HP, which leaked some Cascade Lake-SP SKUs<\/a> and their detailed specifications. This was in some online documentation about the HP Z6 G4 Workstation, which was posted on February 22, 2019. HP quickly removed this information, but the information is out there now.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The leaked Cascade Lake-SP SKUs and their relevant specifications are shown for the most interesting SQL Server choices (at each core count) on the right side of Figure 1. This is important information if you are planning a SQL Server upgrade in the coming months!<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Figure 1: Comparative Skylake-SP and Cascade Lake-SP Specifications<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n To be sure, Cascade Lake-SP does have at least two useful new features compared to Skylake-SP. The first is hardware-level protection from many Spectre\/Meltdown vulnerabilities<\/a>. These will perform better than existing software or firmware-level fixes. The second is support for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (Apache Pass<\/a>). This may be useful for some SQL Server workloads.<\/span><\/p>\n So far, there seem to be some gaps in the Cascade Lake-SP SKU lineup, with no direct replacement for the Gold 6128 or Gold 6146. I have been told that Cascade Lake-SP will be a phased rollout from Intel, with not all SKUs being immediately announced.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe Cascade Lake-SP Leak<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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\n<\/strong>As you can see in Figure 1, the equivalent Cascade Lake-SP SKUs have fairly minor base clock speed increases (100-300MHz). They also have fairly minor Turbo clock speed increases (200-300MHz). The 24-core Xeon Platinum 8260 also gets an L3 cache size increase to 35.75MB. That processor is still not a good choice for SQL Server usage due to its low base clock speed.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nNew Features in Cascade Lake-SP<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n