Intel has announced the discontinuance of the company’s 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors. Cascade Lake is two generations behind Intel’s existing 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors, so it’s remarkable that the former survived this long.
Cascade Lake has been around since 2019, which was the year when Intel released it to replace the long-lasting Skylake microarchitecture. Poor Cascade Lake has gone through a lot. Due to the constant pressure by AMD’s 7nm EPYC Rome chips, Intel was forced to discontinue some of its Cascade Lake Xeon SKUs precipitately while lowering the pricing on the surviving models. Shortly after, Cascade Lake went through a refresh, introducing the Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh parts with a pricing reduction of up to 60% per core.
For those of you who know Intel, the chipmaker doesn’t have a habit of slashing prices on its processors, much less launching a refresh in such a short time. Cascade Lake’s extreme feature segmentation contributed to the microarchitecture’s downfall. For example, not all Cascade Lake chips supported the same amount of memory or Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs. On the other hand, AMD’s EPYC Rome lineup offered consumers the same feature set across all its SKUs.
Intel terminated Cascade Lake-X (HEDT) and Cascade Lake-W (workstation) processors in July of this year. As expected, the Xeon chips are the next parts to get the chopping block. The product discontinuation applies to both tray and boxed Cascade Lake Xeon processors. Intel listed 68 Cascade Lake products in its PCN (Product Change Notification) document. The chipmaker’s customers have until April 26, 2024, to submit the last orders to their local Intel representative. Intel has committed to ship the last Cascade Lake Xeon orders out by October 23, 2026; therefore, Cascade Lake won’t completely disappear from the shelves for at least another couple of years.
In another PCN document, Intel highlighted that there is no change for Intel embedded customers. Thus, Cascade Lake-embedded processors are the last 22 living members of the Cascade Lake lineage. Embedded products have a longer life span than their socket counterparts, so it’s unsurprising that the Cascade Lake embedded SKUs will be around for a bit longer. Finally, Intel has transferred its Cascade Lake embedded chips over to the Intel Embedded Architecture for continued support, effective after October 23, 2026.
