2700d Driver
In Libman
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Like Patrick at STH, I've been eagerly awaiting this product introduction since 2015's Xeon D-1500 launch, and 2018's watt-thirstier Xeon D-2100 launch, and it's finally happened, just ahead of Mobile World Congress, appropriately enough. Seven years of watching the proven benefits at the edge from an efficient, compact, and rugged design with integrated networking is finally getting new life and more use-cases at the edge than ever before. It seems likely this major product refresh will thrive in the market, but that's not to say that I don't have a concerns about its suitability for home lab enthusiasts, who were basically an accidental beneficiary of this movement of fast and efficient computing at the edge.
While it's not yet known for sure whether these will be on the VMware Compatibility Guide, that sure seems likely given the 7 years of ESXi support many systems based on Xeon D Series have enjoyed, including the owners of the popular Bundle. Note that Intel hasn't revealed pricing (Mar 10 Update - pricing here), and only time will tell how long it will really be before volume shipment availability. Meanwhile, we have some pretty darn impressive specs and new features to sift through here together, read onward.
Rumor no more, Xeon D-1700/2700 is now announced, and it turns out the specs I had heard about were pretty much spot-on. Special thanks to TinkerTry commenter under the pseudonym "IcelakeD" for bringing this major product launch to my attention within an hour of the 11am eastern embargo end time. I soon found that Patrick Kennedy from STH already had an enthusiastic article and video up, great content, watch or read it carefully.
Up to 2.4 times improvement for visual processing inference.
Up to 1.7 times improvement for complex networking workloads like 5G UPF at the network edge.
Up to 1.5 times improvement for SD-WAN, SASE and edge use cases with IPSec.
Up to 1.8 times improvement for application delivery controller, and security appliance use cases with TLS.
Up to 1.56 times improvements for communication appliances.
The Most Innovative System-on-Chip Built for the Edge
The latest Intel Xeon D processor features a one-package design with built-in AI, security, advanced I/O and ethernet, plus dense compute to deliver high data throughput and address key edge requirements that your business demands.
Advanced Integrated Ethernet Connectivity
Integrated Ethernet provides up to 100 Gbps of throughput, with connectivity options that offer links from 1GbE to 100GbE. For storage networking, the SoC platform provides Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for memory transfers between systems that bypass the operating system, increasing throughput and reducing processor overhead and latency. RDMA capabilities include support for both Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) and RoCEv2 (RDMA over Converged Enhanced Ethernet). This flexibility of transport protocols supports topologies of choice for storage architects.
Extended operating temperature ranges1 and industrial-class reliability make Intel Xeon D-1700 and D-2700 processors ideal for high-performance, soldered-down designs. They are suitable for rugged equipment, small form factors, and sealed fanless devices that must run nonstop in the toughest environments.
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See configuration disclosure for details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Search the Intel Marketplace for Xeon D-1700 or Xeon D-2700.
When I search it for the Xeon D-1700, I currently get just 3 industrial designs for results, with networking between 1GbE and 10GbE, and only 2 SO-DIMMs, which tends to mean pricey memory. Operating systems don't say VMware, but they do say Linux and Windows, and I also spotted USB 3.2,but not sure about that.
From what I have read so far, the Xeon D-1700 is definitely the Xeon D family member of the most interest to me personally. Those 8 core and below TDPs look like candidates for fanless designs too, which could be really amazing for folks whose home office doubles as a bedroom. The Xeon D-1700 is also looking to be less power hungry than any similar, upcoming AMD EPYC offerings, but I'd love to be wrong about that, competition and multi-sourcing is a good thing for the consumer and the health of this industry. I'm hoping supply chains holds up and Intel and AMD are both able to ship new single-socket efficient data center CPUs in large volumes this year, at price points that make sense. Fingers crossed!
This is a little like a Xeon E, but with fast built-in networking.
This is a little like a Xeon W, but more for server use than workstation use.
This Xeon D-1700 is it's own thing, an SoC (System on Chip) design that allows for improved efficiency, while allowing for PCIe 4.0 (aka PCIe Gen 4) bus speeds for roughly double NVMe SSD speeds over PCIe 3.0. It offers up to 1TB of DDR4/2933 MHz RAM for those big home labs, and some SKUs expected to have 100GbE for very fast networking, lessening the need for multiple cables for some use cases. There's a range of 1.3GHz to 3.5GHz here too.
Yes, I'm excited about this announcement, but it will be even better once I have assurance VMware runs great on it, without any special install tweaks or PSOD avoidance hacks. Even better, this single-socket solution for Edge use cases could very well come in handy for some of my day job's customers, so my first-hand learnings running Xeon D-1700 24x7 for my home's "production" workloads could come in handy there too. This is often one of the points of a home lab, isn't it?
For enthusiasts who enjoyed his article, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Any amount helps greatly, especially given how difficult it has become to obtain revenue sources for the growth of this website and suite of hardware to test.
Without advanced access to this major product launch, I needed some time to digest the wealth of information to provide TinkerTry's Take on these exciting new Sunny Cove core 10 nanometer chips that are looking* very *promising for virtualization home labs.
Briefly I had listed 100GbE capability, but that should have read 100GbE throughput capability, in the form of 4 x 25GbE. This has been corrected. Again my apologies, as I wasn't briefed by Intel in advance or after launch directly, nor have I had any success with reaching out to them directly.
Closing thoughts
Given the higher return rates for 1U Xeon D-1500 systems to Wiredzone these past 3 years, I still have no regrets to focusing my attention on the much more versatile mini-tower form factor Bundles, with far greater family acceptance factor and bang-for-your-buck than all similarly priced 1U variants. That's all detailed at TinkerTry.com/compare. That said, of course I've been keeping my eye out for appealing alternatives all along, seen here for example.
Closing thoughts
Finally, my thoughts. I had frankly hoped a 3 year wait would result in a smaller than the 14nm design of the original Xeon D, but that just isn't happening quite yet. Perhaps pressure from AMD will accelerate the shrink soon, which would tend to result in even lower watt burn.
Misses
Higher watts generally means louder fans, or larger chassis, or both
Larger CPU size may mean Mini ITX motherboard designs have no room for M.2 slots, example pictured here
On July 26, I learned from Wiredzone that they are no longer able to accept orders for the SuperServer Bundles due to a combination of logistics and profitability challenges that 2021 has posed. I'm truly sorry for the inconvenience and frustration this may cause.
The Xeon D series is interesting. We saw platforms focusing on the 5G Open vRAN market as well as more traditional networking markets. Beyond these platforms, Xeon D gets used in many applications from control planes for switches to controls for airplanes. These products will be around for many years so getting new features is not just about what is available today, but also what will be needed in the future. That is why seeing big feature upgrades with this generation is very important.
Rakuten Mobile deployed the world's first open, fully virtualized cloud native infrastructure in Japan to deliver a reliable, flexible, scalable, secure and resilient mobile network for its partners and end customers. It has incorporated the new Intel Xeon D processor for optimal performance while meeting its specifications to design Symware, a compact, lightweight, self-cooling and weatherproof, containerized RAN solution, working in collaboration with Intel and Juniper. The solution is optimal for the densest urban environments in the world, and in this case, Tokyo, demonstrating the power of vRAN, built on Intel technology.
Those deploying the Xeon D processors are not running applications that are bandwidth constrained as much as they are compute constrained and they also need to encrypt data in flight and at rest. To that end, the Sunny Cove core has lots of new cryptographic instructions as well as data compression instructions, which will be important for storage appliances as well as for 5G base stations, and of course there are AVX-512 vector math units with mixed precision integer support to do all kinds of things, including running AI inference out there at the edge.
if you attempt to boot ESXi on an Alder Lake CPU, it will actually PSOD (Purple Screen of Death)
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Before folks get too excited, I do have some slightly bad news to share if you are considering ESXi with the 10GbE option. The inbox Marvell driver for ESXi does not currently support this particular consumer 10GbE network adapter.