Performance + Efficiency for Accelerated AI Workloads and Beyond
5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors for Nutanix Cloud Platform
The Nutanix team is excited to announce Nutanix Cloud Platform™ (NCP) support for the latest 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, code-named “Emerald Rapids.” Support for the latest Xeon processors extends from Nutanix NX™ servers to a range of certified OEM server platforms from leading manufacturers.
With 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Nutanix customers can expect to benefit from improved performance, hardware-layer accelerators, and enhanced power efficiency for reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). Whether it’s AI, VDI, databases, or analytics, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors are ready to accelerate business-critical workloads while enabling a truly modern datacenter and hybrid cloud.
About Nutanix Cloud Platform
NCP is a unified multicloud platform that allows organizations to build and run all of their workloads and applications, regardless of scale or location. Nutanix customers can modernize their legacy IT infrastructure onto a common software platform, along with newly developed cloud-native applications spanning public clouds, datacenters, and disparate edge locations.
NCP runs on clusters of servers and integrates shared compute, storage, and networking resources into a pool that can be provisioned to end users to power various workloads. Centralized management and automation enable IT to efficiently manage a global environment, while users and application owners can focus on their applications, enabling a cloud operating model without the tradeoffs.
Learn more About Nutanix Cloud Platform
Next-Generation Hardware Support
NCP is built to run on platforms from a range of Nutanix partners and OEM providers, giving customers the flexibility to tailor the right hardware to unique business requirements. Supported platforms include the Nutanix NX, Cisco UCS®, HPE ProLiant® DX, Lenovo ThinkAgile® HX, Dell XC™ / XC+, and Fujitsu PRIMERGY® XF servers.
5th Gen Intel Xeon processors deliver a broad range of processor and platform enhancements, including up to 64 cores per CPU, 5600 MT/s memory speed, up to 3x faster L3 cache (compared to 3rd Gen Xeon® processors), and increased UPI speeds of up to 20GT/s (vs. 16 GT/s in 4th Gen), in addition to significantly improved power efficiency. Because they employ a shared platform architecture, platforms based on 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors can seamlessly expand compute capacity to existing 4th Gen Intel-based Nutanix clusters.
The 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors continue to offer multiple built-in accelerators in the CPU itself, designed to reduce latency by offloading encryption, compression, and public key exchange workloads from the CPU. Nutanix will be taking advantage of the built-in AI accelerator, Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX), to increase performance for a range of AI inference use cases.
Learn more about Nutanix-supported platforms and review detailed platform specifications with the dynamic spec sheet
The 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor family is built to enable demanding new applications for AI, analytics, networking, storage, and more. Our latest generation offers unprecedented workload acceleration while achieving an average of 36% higher performance per watt across a diverse range of workloads. Our team is excited to kick off the latest chapter in Intel’s partnership with Nutanix, and we cannot wait to see what Nutanix customers will accomplish with these latest technologies.
Our team at Nutanix has already seen Intel’s 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors deliver tangible value to our customers using Nutanix Cloud Platform, and we expect the latest 5th Gen Xeon® processor family to build on this success. The Intel Nutanix partnership is forging ahead in a new era defined by AI-enriched applications, and doing so while delivering practical benefits for energy consumption, cost, security, and more. NCP unites public cloud simplicity and agility with private cloud performance and security, and we are proud to help our clients realize these benefits while leveraging Emerald Rapids processors’ impressive new capabilities.
High-Performance All-NVMe Solutions with Advanced AOS Storage and Intel VMD
Nutanix leverages 5th Gen Intel Xeon technologies to provide all-NVMe solutions with advanced performance and resilience benefits. 5th Gen-compatible platforms from major server vendors provide a large number of PCIe Gen 5 links, enabling Nutanix solutions to offer configurations with up to 24 individual NVMe drives directly connected to CPUs– eliminating the cost of discrete adapters. Nutanix AOS storage has been optimized to take advantage of NVMe performance, scaling up to a large number of NVMe drives.
5th Gen Intel Xeon processors for Nutanix solutions also deliver enhanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). AOS storage provides advanced resiliency features that preserve performance and protect data in the case of drive failures. In particular, all nodes and all drives in a Nutanix cluster contribute to the rebuild of a single drive, dramatically increasing speed, while new writes are protected during a drive rebuild.
Additionally, the Nutanix storage stack is integrated with the RAS features of Intel® Volume Management Device (VMD), enabling hot plug and unplug serviceability for NVMe drives and future storage expansion through the addition of NVMe drives.
AI-Ready, Workload-Optimized Performance
Built to optimize performance for demanding workloads like AI, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors employ built-in AI accelerators—Intel AMX—on every core, delivering critical performance gains for AI workloads, including smaller Large Language Models (LLMs).
Out of the box, performance is validated for over 300 popular AI models. AMX supports inference for generative AI, as well as other predictive and interpretive AI workloads, without the need for GPUs.
Ideal for inference, AMX supports LLMs with up to 10 billion parameters, in addition to a range of other machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) workloads. AMX can support the needs of almost every stage of the AI pipeline, with the exception of large training workloads, while saving on capital and operational costs (including power and cooling).
Compared to 4th Gen Intel Xeon CPUs, 5th gen offers 1.4x1 or greater gains for inference workloads, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and ML/DL. For organizations on a 5-year upgrade cycle or longer, performance gains are even more dramatic:
- Up to 1.84x improvement for general compute performance
- Up to 14x performance gains for inference and AI training workloads
- Up to 3.6x higher throughput for networking and storage, with up to 65% latency reduction for large packet sequential reads.
These benefits continue to scale progressively for previous Xeon generations. For example, Nutanix customers running 2nd Gen processors can benefit from performance gains as high as 2.76x.
Security and Efficiency for a Truly Modern Datacenter
The 5th Gen Intel Xeon Processors are designed to deliver practical benefits for modern datacenters as well as enhanced core and SOC interconnect power efficiency in addition to a process revision update. With an improved active idle mode and a fully integrated voltage regulator tuned for idle power efficiency, these changes enable 1.34x higher average package performance per watt compared to the prior generation and approximately 100W savings per socket at idle.
Improved performance and higher core counts translate directly to fewer required processors for equivalent workloads, enabling consolidation, streamlining scalability, and reducing customer power and cooling costs.
By deploying fewer servers to serve equivalent workloads, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors can drive 77% lower TCO (compared to a 5-year-old platform).
Learn More About Simplifying Your IT Environment
With the support of Nutanix for 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, businesses can unlock new potential in AI and data center efficiency.
If you’re new to Nutanix, check out an NCP Test Drive, powered by Intel Xeon processors, to see just how simple your IT environment can be.
1: Performance and power efficiency comparisons are sourced from Intel’s 5th Gen Intel Xeon background presentation, available on request.
Notices & Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site [edc.intel.com].
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates.
For configurations see intel.com/processorclaims: 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Results may vary.
No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary.
Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.
©2024 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Portions of this content have been provided by Intel and are © Intel Corporation.