What SP Xeon CPU's support 1GB Large Pages (pdpe1gb flag)

[PeterCoe]

We have a customer that wants to confirm that the 6346 CPU supports 1GB Large Pages (pdpe1gb flag), we know how to check for the information using a VM, but the ask has come from OEM and OEM is a little hesitant to ask the customer to do this test.

We suspect it is one of those default capabilities across CPUs today, but wanted to make sure, or if there is any location where we list all of the flags/instruction sets for each CPU

We have verified on a 6314U CPU as well as a 8380 CPU that the pdpe1gb flag exists, just want confirmation or a good location to verify for future reference. Does our chip QA check this feature/function?

[Steven_Intel]

Hello PeterCoe,

Thank you for posting on the Intel️® communities. We will move your question to the correct sub forum, the team in charge will get back to you soon.

Regards,

Steven G.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[SergioS_Intel]

Hello PeterCoe,

Thank you for your question. 

In order to better assist you, can you please share with us the documentation stating 6314U CPU as well as a 8380 CPU pdpe1gb flag exists?

We will be looking forward to your updates.

Best regards,

Sergio S.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[PeterCoe]

Question came from Automobile customer via their OEM Dell, early last month...

I am trying to check the CPUs (Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6346 CPU @ 3.10GHz) in the latest batch of servers support 1GB Huge Pages for use with VMware NSX 3.2 VM edge nodes DPDK, I cant seem to locate this info online, can you help?

We have replied to Dell ...

“... if the CPU supports a pdpe1gb flag then it supports 1GB Huge pages, so it is a CPU question not a networking one, if Dell/customer look at /proc/cpuinfo that should tell them if the pdpe1gb flag is there. We can confirm that looking today at a 6314 CPU in our system we can see the pdpe1gb flag. We do not currently have access to a 6346 system sorry but will check with our silicon/SW teams to confirm this feature is consistent across all SP Gen 3 CPU's. If you do not see the flag in the VM, then you need to check the ESXi host itself, it could be a VM Hardware version indifference”.

Second update...

To check this on customer system they need to deploy a Ubuntu VM to the host, then log into the ubuntu VM and run the command cat /proc/cpuinfo ,they will get a result like this: (see attached)

Does our silicon Xeon team honestly not have a list of supported instruction sets for Gen 3 SP Xeon? 

[SergioS_Intel]

Hello PeterCoe,

Please allow us to check on your question and we will get back to you.

We appreciate your patience.

Best regards,

Sergio S.

Intel Customer Support Technician

For firmware updates and troubleshooting tips, visit :https://intel.com/support/serverbios

[SergioS_Intel]

Hello PeterCoe,

Thank you for waiting for our updates.

The Intel(R) Xeon(R) Scalable Processors (formerly Skylake, Cascade Lake, and Ice Lake) do support pdpe1gb. 

Unfortunately, we do not have a list of processors that support 1GB huge pages (pdpe1gb).

If you are interested in other Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor, please let us know and we can check on additional individual processors. 

In case you need additional information, please let us know.

Best regards,

Sergio S.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[PeterCoe]

Thank you this confirmation, we are only interested in Xeon SP range of products so this is good news. However is this documented publicly anywhere so customers have access to confirmation of this feature? if you could point me to this that would be excellent. If not then could we add this to Intel ARK as features/functions generically supported by Xeon SP products perhaps?

Peter 

[SergioS_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hello PeterCoe,

We currently do not have this information available; however, we can check individually for each processor.

We appreciate the feedback provided and will try to add this information on Intel Ark.

Please let us know if you need further assistance or if we can close this thread.

Best regards,

Sergio S.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[PeterCoe]

Hi Sergio, thank you for the help and support, you can now close this thread. btw we are also getting our ADC in UK to double check this feature is supported by the 6346 specifically (SMG - you can never be too careful),

Many thanks 

Peter