On April 2, 2019, Intel had their Data-Centric Innovation Day<\/a>, where they announced and described a number of new products for data center use. Most relevant from a SQL Server perspective is the 2nd Generation Intel Scalable Processor family, aka Cascade Lake-SP. This line of 14nm processors are the successor to the existing 14nm Intel Scalable Processor family<\/a> (Skylake-SP) that was released in Q3 2017. These new processors will work with existing model servers (with a BIOS update), so there should be no delay waiting on server vendors to do a model refresh.<\/font><\/p>\n This new family of processors has minor base and turbo clock speed improvements (typically 200 MHz). They also support DDR4-2933 RAM (at two DIMMs per channel) and 256GB LRDIMMs. This means you can have up to 1.5TB of RAM per socket, with the base, non-M or L suffix SKUs. That is a doubling of memory capacity compared to Skylake-SP. Some of the mid-range Cascade Lake-SP <\/font><\/font>SKUs have larger L3 cache sizes compared to the equivalent Skylake-SP SKUs. Cascade Lake-SP also has Optane DC Persistent Memory support and hardware-level Spectre and Meltdown mitigations. Unfortunately, there is no PCIe 4.0 support with Cascade Lake-SP.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n There are some issues with Cascade Lake-SP for SQL Server usage. Not from a technical or performance perspective, but from a product segmentation perspective. First, Intel has introduced a number of new model number letter suffixes which make processor selection more complicated and potentially much more expensive.<\/font><\/p>\n The complete list of SKU suffix letters are as follows:<\/font><\/p>\n Confused yet? Suffice it say, you will want to avoid those specialized SKUs for most SQL Server usage, with the possible exception of the M or L models if you need higher memory density. Another exception might be the \u201cY\u201d, Speed Select (SST) SKUs, which let you pin workloads to specific cores (which can have an increased base clock speed) while the other cores have a reduced base clock speed. Another variant of Speed Select (SST-PP) lets you vary the number of cores and clock speeds at boot time. This feature would probably be in violation of current SQL Server licensing, where Microsoft expects you to pay for all of the physical cores in a machine, whether they are enabled or not.<\/font><\/p>\n If you decide to use Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, your maximum memory speed will be reduced to DDR4-2666. Intel has not released pricing for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory yet, which means that it will be expensive (but less expensive\/GB than DDR4 RAM).<\/font><\/p>\n A bigger issue for SQL Server usage is the fact Intel has apparently dropped at least two of their frequency-optimized SKUs from the previous generation. Based on today\u2019s information, I don\u2019t see a 12-core Intel Xeon Gold 6246 or a 6-core Intel Xeon Gold 6228. These would replace the previous Intel Xeon Gold 6146<\/a> and Intel Xeon Gold 6128<\/a>. There don\u2019t appear to be any 6-core SKUs outside of the Intel Xeon Bronze 3204 (which would be a terrible choice for SQL Server usage).<\/font><\/p>\n In fact, there are only five specific Cascade Lake-SP SKUs that I really like for SQL Server usage (if you want the best single-threaded performance possible). These include:<\/font><\/p>\n All of these SKUs have slightly higher base and turbo clock speeds than their direct Skylake-SP predecessors. All of them (except the Platinum 8168) are the same price as their predecessors. The Platinum 8268 has a larger L3 cache than the Platinum 8168, which somewhat justifies a price increase. The problem is that missing 6-core SKU and the big gap between the 8-core and the 18-core SKUs. That gap represents about $142K in SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition licenses costs in a two-socket server.<\/font><\/p>\n Figures 1 and 2 show the main specifications for my preferred SKUs for Cascade Lake-SP and Skylake-SP (for SQL Server usage).<\/font><\/p>\n Figure 1: Preferred Cascade Lake-SP SKUs<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n As you can see, there were fewer large gaps in the core counts of these \u201cgood\u201d processor choices for SQL Server usage with Skylake-SP.<\/font><\/p>\n Figure 2: Preferred Skylake-SP SKUs<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n We already have the first TPC-E submission for a system using Cascade Lake-SP processors. Lenovo recently submitted a result<\/a> for a two-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650<\/a> with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. This system had a score of 7012.53. If you divide that score by 56 physical cores, you get a result of 125.22\/core.<\/font><\/p>\n
<\/font><\/p>\nCascade Lake-SP Improvements<\/font><\/font><\/h2>\n
<\/font><\/p>\nCascade Lake-SP Regressions<\/font><\/font><\/h2>\n
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<\/font><\/p>\nMissing SKUs<\/font><\/font><\/h2>\n
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<\/font><\/p>\nInitial TPC-E Results<\/font><\/font><\/h2>\n