Bangalore, July 13 2017: With the booming data centre market in its sights,  Intel this week  unveiled its new and  improved Xeon processor line -- a family of 4 processors -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum -- offering different levels of performance and up to 28   cores per processor.
The new scalable processor family -- based on Intel's Skylake architecture --  involve a radical  change in how the core in a chip connect with each other: what used to be a ring is now a mesh -- making it easy to scale  performance  up and down depending on the load.  
A palpable change could be seen in the way Intel is marketing its latest offerings.   This is the first time it is focusing  on solutions rather than chips.   In fact it distributed 500,000 of the new Xeon processors to  server makers as early as November last year and this week was able to point at  end solutions from the likes of  HPE, Dell and  Lenovo, which have successfully deployed  the Xeon Processor Scalable Family  to  demonstrate 1.65x to 2.2x performance improvements over the previous generation of Xeons. 
India angle
In India, the National Stock Exchange  and  cloud service provider NextGen  were among those who  were able to  try out  the new  Xeon family ahead of its commercial launch.  "The Bangalore -based teams of Intel contribute several IPs ( intellectual properties) to the Xeon Scalable platform", revealed   Senior Director ( Engineering), Intel India,  Srikanth Nimmagadda, at the Bangalore launch event. 
In another canny move that shows how Intel wants to move up the value chain fro chip provider to solution provider, it also offered ready-made  "Select Solutions" -- combos of hardware and software for, VMWare's  Virtual SAN, Microsoft's  SQL Server and Ubuntu's  NFVi .  It is now working with system providers  like HPE, Ericsson, Lenovo and  Huawei to offer  the data centre and infrastructure  client with ready made  solutions.
Said Prakash Mallya, Managing Director, Sales & Marketing Group, Intel India: “As India Inc. increases its investment in technology, the country’s data centre and network infrastructure will undergo a massive transformation. Emerging use cases in the financial, ITeS, healthcare, and academic sectors will necessitate agile networks that can interpret and implement decisions based on artificial intelligence, HPC, and in the near future, 5G."