Intel Xeon & Optane

E5 v4 chips sit in Dell 13G, HPE Gen9 and Supermicro X10; 1st and 2nd gen Scalable in Dell 14G, HPE Gen10 and the Lenovo SR630/SR650; 3rd gen in Dell 15G and HPE Gen10 Plus. The model number gives the generation away at once. On E5 parts, the v3 or v4 suffix is the generation and the digit after E5- the maximum socket count. On Xeon Scalable, the first digit is the tier and the second the generation – the Gold 6138 is 1st, the Gold 6248 2nd, the Gold 6338 3rd gen.

The 2nd gen fits the same socket as the 1st but needs a BIOS that knows it, so update the BIOS and management firmware before you pull the old processors. There's no crossing between LGA2011-3, LGA3647 and LGA4189, though. All models are under server processors.

Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum: the tiers

• Bronze (3xxx): entry level without turbo or Hyper-Threading, two sockets at most – rarely worth it today.
• Silver (4xxx): Hyper-Threading and turbo, two sockets, slower memory. Economical for file, backup and small virtualisation servers, such as the 85 W Silver 4214.
• Gold 5xxx: up to four sockets, two UPI links between the CPUs.
• Gold 6xxx: up to four sockets, three UPI links, full memory speed and dual AVX-512 units – the all-rounder for virtualisation.
• Platinum 8xxx: up to eight sockets and the highest core counts, up to 28 cores in the 2nd gen, as on the Platinum 8280.

Suffixes change the specification: R marks the 2020 refresh models with more cores or clock speed, limited to one or two sockets, such as the Gold 6248R. M and L allow more memory per socket, U denotes single-socket parts and T an extended temperature range and long availability. Ice Lake-SP, the 3rd gen, supports two sockets at most in every tier; four- and eight-socket servers got the parallel Cooper Lake line instead.

Optane PMem: lots of memory per socket

Intel Optane Persistent Memory sits in a DIMM slot next to normal DDR4 but comes in 128, 256 or 512 GB modules. In Memory Mode, DRAM acts as a cache and the operating system sees the PMem capacity as main memory – no software changes needed. In App Direct Mode, PMem remains a separate, non-volatile memory area that databases or DAX file systems access directly. Which mode suits which workload is covered in our guide Optane PMem: Memory Mode vs App Direct.

Intel is no longer developing Optane. On existing platforms, though, PMem remains a route to a great deal of memory per socket. The same memory technology powers Optane SSDs such as the Optane P4800X: very low latency and high endurance, ideal as a ZFS SLOG or Ceph DB device. Intel network cards such as the X710 and E810 are under network cards.