Intel has just revealed details of their upcoming Xeon Scalable Platform family, known as Cascade Lake. The new platform was demoed today at the SAP Sapphire conference where the chip giant unveiled their new platform that is scheduled for launch in 2018.

Intel Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable Platform Launches in 2018 With Optane DIMM Support

Intel has yet to launch their Skylake-SP Xeon family but they are already talking about the the next refresh, almost a year earlier. It sounds typical of Intel talking about future products so early but it can also be due to AMD's EPYC platform. Based on the Zeppelin core architecture, EPYC datacenter processors are aimed to give Intel a tough time in the server market after years of dominance. Not only does EPYC looks to be disruptive in terms of raw processing power but it would also feature a very competitive marketing strategy.

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While Intel hasn't released any public benchmarks of Skylake-SP Xeons, AMD showcased new data on EPYC's performance against Broadwell-EP (not Skylake-SP) parts. It will be interesting to see the competing platforms pit up against each other in major workloads. But AMD also revealed a long-term strategic roadmap for servers at their Financial Analyst Day. So after EPYC (Previously known as Naples), AMD plans on releasing Rome with 7nm Zen 2 cores in 2018 and Milan with 7nm+ Zen 3.0 cores in 2019. This further puts Intel in a tough position and here they are, talking about their latest and greatest future tech which will compete against AMD Rome server chips in 2018. These are codenamed Intel Cascade Lake and will be replacing the current Xeon Scalable Platform family.

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