Intel plans to add a super-scalable new "Skylake" Xeon processor family of supercomputer caliber central processing units sometime around the middle of this year, and says that the new family represents "the biggest set of data center platform advancements in this decade."

According to Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of the Intel Xeon Products and Data Center Marketing Group, the whole group of Xeon models will be joined into a single family that allows easy scalability for top to bottom, instead of just marketing a mis-mash of Xeon E5 and E7 SKUs.

The new scalable Xeon processor family has optical fabric, networking, accelerators and solid-state disk interfaces on-chip plus high-speed connections to its FPGAs, Nirvana deep learning, multi-processing Xeon Phi and silicon photonics.

Intel has merged its E5 and E7 monikers creating a family of scalable Xeon processors graded from bronze to silver to gold to platinum.

Spelman says the new Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family will deliver workload-optimized performance for compute, network and storage. It provides the foundation for the next generation of cloud infrastructure to fuel applications as wide-ranging as analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, high-performance computing and network transformation. The Scalable family will also feature breakthrough performance, security and agility, according to Spelman.

The Scalable family will feature integrated performance accelerators such as Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512) and Intel QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT), as well as Intel Volume Management Device (Intel VMD), a new platform capability designed to deliver management of PCIe-based (NVMe) solid state drives, such as the recently launched Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X and Intel SSD DC P4600 drives. Intel VMD enables a "hot plug" capability that minimizes service interruptions during drive swaps.

Intel will share more details about when it launch the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family this summer.