Last month, Intel’s new naming scheme for its Xeon processors leaked. Instead of E3, E5, and E7 branding, the chips would be given metallic names, from Bronze at the bottom end through Silver and Gold to Platinum at the top. Today, the company made this new branding official as part of a larger shake-up of its Xeon platform.

The next generation of Xeons, due to arrive this summer, will make up what Intel calls the “Xeon Scalable Processor Family.” This explains the change in core naming that is accompanying the new branding; the SP suffix is replacing the E, EP, and EX suffixes used in previous-generation Xeons.

(credit: Intel)

The change is motivated by the increased diversity in what Intel actually sells. Processors aren’t just processors any more; integrated Ethernet networking is already commonplace, and with the Xeon-SP platform Intel plans to integrate its QuickAssist accelerators (currently available as PCIe cards that accelerate cryptography and compression workloads), the AVX512 vector instruction extensions, and its Omni-Path interconnect. Intel also sells more than just processors and is positioning its Optane memory, FPGAs, Xeon Phi many-core accelerators, and silicon photonics products as broader parts of the platform.