Intel's 28-core Xeon W-3175X listed online, expect to pay at least $4,000

Shawn Knight

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Bottom line: Intel's over-the-top Xeon W-3175X processor is poised to land in stores this month as Intel promised. You'll need an equally ridiculous motherboard, a stout power supply or two, a heavy-duty cooler and gobs of RAM to build a system worthy of this sort of chip. Impressive? Sure. A good value? Not so much.

Intel’s Xeon W-3175X, the drool-inducing workstation CPU that comes unlocked and primed for overclocking, has cropped up for pre-order at several European retailers.

Intel announced the Xeon W-3175X in early October. This 28 core / 56 thread behemoth features a base clock of 3.1GHz but can boost up to 4.3GHz. You also get a generous 38.5MB of Intel Smart Cache and 68 total PCIe lanes (44 from the processor and 24 from the chipset) as well as six-channel DDR4-2666 memory support with a maximum capacity of 512GB.

The workstation-class chip carries a TDP of 255W so you’ll want to pair it with a very capable cooler, especially if you’re planning to overclock.

Intel’s new chip has surfaced at four online retailers – Edis Computers, Lacne-Nakupy, Kikatek and PC21 – priced between $4,700 and $5,200 (give or take a few bucks) after VAT. It should be a bit cheaper once they show up in the US sans VAT although if pricing is a concern than this platform probably isn’t for you. Just have a look at the sort of motherboard it requires.

Intel said at the time of announcement that the CPU would ship in December and these early listings seem to indicate that it is indeed on schedule to make that window.

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And expect lots of bugs. Not usable for virtualization, for instance. Not usable for running multiple users on the same machine.
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Why would you buy this over one of the higherend threadripper models at half the price?

I believe many organizations will rationalize it as being the "stable" choice. There are many big companies that won't even look at Threadripper until it has at least 5 years on the market. Given the price though, it's almost tempting to just buy Ryzen anyways as there's enough room in the price difference to buy redundancy.
 
I believe many organizations will rationalize it as being the "stable" choice. There are many big companies that won't even look at Threadripper until it has at least 5 years on the market. Given the price though, it's almost tempting to just buy Ryzen anyways as there's enough room in the price difference to buy redundancy.

Agreed. That's main problem with AMD. Many companies are too stupid to buy AMD even if it's better in every aspect and also cheaper.
 
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