[ISCA 2023 Tutorial] On-chip Accelerators in 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors: Features, Performance, Use Cases, and Future!

Abstract

Workloads are evolving — and so is computer architecture. Traditionally, adding more cores to your CPU or choosing a higher-frequency CPU would improve workload performance and efficiency, but these techniques alone can no longer guarantee the same benefits they achieved in the past. Modern workloads place increased demands on compute, network and storage resources. In response, a growing trend exists to deploy power-efficient accelerators to offload specialized functions and reserve compute cores for general-purpose tasks. Offloading specialized tasks to AI, security, HPC, networking, analytics and storage accelerators can result in faster time to results and power savings.

As a result, Intel has integrated the broadest set of built-in accelerators in 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to boost performance, reduce latency and increase power efficiency. Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel® Accelerator Engines can help your business solve today’s most rigorous workload challenges across cloud, networking and enterprise deployments.

This tutorial provides an overview of the latest built-in accelerators – Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), QuickAssist Technology (QAT), and Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB) – and their rich functionalities supported by Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Processors. With several flexible programming models and software libraries, these accelerators have been proven to be beneficial to a wide range of data center infrastructures and applications. In addition, the hands-on labs of this tutorial will take Intel DSA as an example to provide the attendees with the basic knowledge of how to configure, invoke, and make the most out of it with both microbenchmarks and real applications.