Out-of-Box: By default, each 5th Gen Intel Xeon and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor contains from 0 to 4 accelerators that are “turned on” by default. Refer to the 5th Gen Intel Xeon and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors tables, at the columns highlighted below to determine how many of the Intel Accelerators are turned on.

Default Accelerators

With the On-Demand feature, customers can upgrade the number of accelerators, depending on their CPU choice. 5th Gen Intel Xeon and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors that have the ability to upgrade the number of Intel Accelerators can be found in the rightmost column of the 5th Gen Intel Xeon and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors tables.

On-demand accelerators

For workloads that run into bottlenecks on data processing:

  • Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA)
  • In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA)
  • Quick Assist Technology Accelerator (QAT)
  • Data Load balance Accelerator (DLB)

To enhance CPU core-level security for applications:

  • SGX enclaves

For workloads that require complex computation (not considered an accelerator):

  • AVX2 – Scalar Computation
  • Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)

Intel® Data Streaming Accelerator (Intel® DSA)

Drive high performance for storage, networking, and data-intensive workloads by improving streaming data movement and transformation operations. Intel® Data Streaming Accelerator (Intel® DSA) is designed to offload the most common data movement tasks that cause overhead in data center-scale deployments. Intel DSA helps speed up data movement across the CPU, memory, and caches, as well as all attached memory, storage, and network devices.

Intel® In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel® IAA)

Run database and analytics workloads faster, with potentially greater power efficiency. Intel® In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel® IAA) increases query throughput and decreases the memory footprint for in-memory database and big data analytics workloads. Intel IAA is ideal for in-memory databases, open source databases, and data stores like RocksDB and ClickHouse.

Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT)

Help reduce system resource consumption - and TCO - by accelerating cryptography and data compression with Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT). By offloading encryption, decryption, and compression, this built-in accelerator helps free up processor cores so that systems can serve a larger number of clients or use less power. Get the most value when you merge compression and encryption - with Intel QAT, Intel Xeon processors are the highest-performance CPU that can compress and encrypt in a single data flow.

Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel® DLB)

Improve the system performance related to handling network data on multi-core Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel® DLB) enables the efficient distribution of network processing across multiple CPU cores/threads and dynamically distributes network data across multiple CPU cores for processing as the system load varies. Intel DLB also restores the order of networking data packets processed simultaneously on CPU cores.

SGX Enclaves

Security threats have never been greater in the world of virtualization/micro-service architecture, with over 45% of data breach being cloud based. With SPR, Intel now offers an On-Demand Feature to enhance security, by embedding CPU-hardware based security (know as enclaves), to allow developers or cloud infrastructure managers to isolate specific application code and data in private regions of memory, for confidential computing solutions.

The 5th Gen Intel Xeon and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors address a wide range of workloads. Different processor models contain different number of these accelerators per CPU. Users may upgrade (Intel On-Demand) the number of Intel Accelerators based on their workloads.

There are 4 types of license key options (each require an additional cost).

  • Analytic Suite 1 (allow 1x IAA to be activated).
  • Analytic Suite 4 (allow 4x IAA and 4x DSA be activated)
  • Communication/Storage Suite 2 (allow 2x QAT and 2x DLB be activated).
  • Communication/Storage Suite 4 (allow 4x QAT, 4x DLB, and 4x DSA be activated).

There is a maximum total of 16 or 4 x 4 types of accelerators.

SGX512 (allow Default SGX – memory enclave for confidential computing) increase up to 512GB)

To learn more about how using the Intel Accelerators increases performance and how your data center will be able to increase performance and reduce power consumption please click here.

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