Intel teases Sapphire Rapids workstation CPUs coming "pretty soon"

Shawn Knight

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In a nutshell: Sapphire Rapids workstation chips are expected across a range of SKUs including the flagship Xeon W9-3495X with support for both DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5. The highest-end chip is said to feature 56 cores / 112 threads with a base clock of 1.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.8GHz with 105MB of L3 cache and a 350W TDP.

Sapphire Rapids-based workstation CPUs from Intel are in the works and you might not have to wait long to get your hands on them.

In a teaser video shared on Twitter, two Intel employees are seen talking tech. Midway through, the guy turns to his coworker and asks about her new Sapphire Rapids system. She comments on how ridiculous it is, adding that it used to take a whole room full of computers to do what the system can now accomplish on its own.

"There go my 30-minute rendering coffee breaks," she quips.

When asked about shipping, the lady said she was in a meeting recently and learned that final test runs are coming back "really good," meaning they are likely to ship out "pretty soon." Bad acting aside, it's a good sign that Intel is officially talking about these parts.

As VideoCardz highlights, Sapphire Rapids-WS (codenamed Fishhawk Falls) is viewed as Intel's response to AMD's Threadripper Pro series workstation chips. They'll use Intel's new W790 platform with an LGA-4677 socket, with the higher-end W-3400 CPUs expected to support 112 PCIe lanes and eight channels of DDR5-4800.

Intel is set to host a launch event for Sapphire Rapids on January 10, just a couple of days after the Consumer Electronics Show wraps up in Las Vegas. Presumably, this launch will focus more on the server side of things. It seems like CES would be the ideal stage for a launch event, what with the entire tech community in town, but I digress.

Last month, AMD announced its fourth generation of Epyc data center processors headlined by the Epyc 9654 with 96 cores, 192 threads, 384MB of L3 cache and a 360W TDP. The cost? Nearly $12,000.

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300 watt cpu, 400 watt gpu. 600 watt PSUs are really becoming obsolete for stuff beyond entry level computers.
 
300 watt cpu, 400 watt gpu. 600 watt PSUs are really becoming obsolete for stuff beyond entry level computers.

Remember that these are workstation class CPUs though. 300W is a pretty meaningless number by itself when you consider it is the efficiency of an entire office or data center that matters. If one 300W CPU can be used for a task that previously took 2 CPUs at 200W each for equal time, that's a huge win for overall efficiency.

Time vs. power is also very important. If you use 300W for 10 minutes vs. 200W for >15 minutes, the 300W for less time is still more power efficient for the given task.
 
It's about time AMD got some competition in this sector.
While I agree, it doesn't make any difference to 99.9% of us. These aren't affordable cpu's and overkill for home users. Would have loved these in physics workstations though when someone else was paying for them.
 
It's about time AMD got some competition in this sector.
Let's see how these new chips perform first. I'm hopeful, as I think healthy(!) competiton is a good thing, but I want to see those independent reviews (even if I don't believe I will ever buy any of these parts - it's just fascinating, as a marvel of engineering)
 
Remember that these CPU's are at least three years late so basically they are 2019 stuff. No problems for AMD.
 
Coming soon to your desktops.

And very soon to cold-fusion powered laptops as well.
 
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