Prior to MWC Barcelona 2022, Intel announced two edge Xeon D processors, part of the Ice Lake family, designed for AI and other functions at the edge of IOT networks where space is tight and power is limited.
The new Intel Xeon D-2700 and Intel Xeon D-1700 were described Thursday at Intel’s “Built for Wonderful” virtual preview for MWC next week.
Rakuten Mobile is one of 70 customers Intel said is using the processors either in trial or production in recent weeks. Rakuten has deployed the processors in a public outdoor network in Tokyo, a rugged edge environment. Other customers using Intel to support 5G include American Tower, AT&T, BT, Ericsson, Verizon and Zeblok.
“Xeon D is a really critical product line, especial for space-constrained uses with 5G,” said Jeni Panhorst, Intel general manager of network and edge platform in a briefing with analysts and reporters.
Developers working with AI and ML are “leading the way” in processor needs as they shift to “software-defined everything,” Panhorst said.
The Xeon D-2700 can scale to as many as 24 cores, while the 1700 scales to 10 cores. “Key customers have a breadth of choices leveraging the same software, which is a huge benefit for them,” Panhorst said.
“Integration of AI at the edge is here now. In fact, developers are pushing it,” added Samir Soni, chief engineer and platform architect at Intel.
Intel also announced updates to software, Intel Smart Edge and OpenVINO, to help developers deploy inference functions faster across a network from cloud to edge.
The OpenVINO update is the “biggest release in three years,” said Sachin Katti, Intel CTO in the network and edge group. “It improves performance without making the developer figure out how to implement it. It’s a killer app for workloads at the edge.”
The Xeon D-2700 CPU is clocked at a 2.4 times improvement in visual processing inference (on OpenVINO) when compared to a previous generation Intel Xeon D-1600.
Security workload and 5G User Plane Function performance are also improved, Intel said. UPF is the function that connects data coming over a Radio Area Network to the internet.
Intel made it clear it is keeping out an eye to competitors, even as its Ice Lake production on the 10nm node previously was delayed two quarters, much to the concern of investors watching AMD, Nvidia and others. “No one else can work at scale like Intel,” said Dan Rodriguez, general manager of the network platform group at Intel.
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