There are two branches that will be well differentiated within the same architecture, like Sapphire Rapids. Apparently Intel will segment the market into HEDT y Workstation to hit its rival much better and harder, and among these there will be a greater range of processors, so anything can happen as we will see below.
Sapphire Rapids Workstation Platform
What can we expect here? We’re talking about the successor to the Xeon Ice Lake-X, the so controversial processors that ended up succumbing to EPYC and as such, although they waged war, AMD’s push ended up with them. gradually push in sales to a corner. Intel continues to sell them at a good pace, but AMD is gaining ground at a steep pace, so they need a “refresh”.
Said refresh will come with this new architecture and with some data that we have already revealed some time ago, such as the 56 hearts
The maximum TDP that is tested is 350 watts, so in principle there would be room for improvement in frequencies, although we don’t know how much. Remember that the watt per clock prevails here. On the other hand, we will have available up to 16 DDR5 memory DIMMs which in its maximum slot configuration will have a speed of 4.400 MT / s, while if it decreases to 8 channels
On the other hand, the 112 PCIe 5.0 lanes and support for a single processor per motherboard, so there will no longer be dual slot setups as such, a decision that could be controversial, as well as the fact that some accelerators might not work on these workstations, perhaps to force companies to buy the new FPGAs. Finally, the prices of the most expensive processors would be between 3000 and 5000 dollars, surely more towards this last value.
What’s new in the general public
Here we are talking about the natural successors of the already well used Cascade Lake-X HEDT and of course the Xeon-W with overclocking capabilities. What does Intel have in store for you? Well, starting with a few tweaks between 28 and 36 hearts in MCC configuration (it is not at all clear) being perhaps the most plausible option the first, where the frequencies will mark everything.
The 10nm node will stretch in these configurations between the 4.5 GHz and some rumors speak that we might even see 5 GHz, depending on the configuration that Intel chooses on its chips. The high end may not run at the maximum frequency of the series as usual. The TDP will again be controversial, as it is estimated between 270 watts and 400 watts
As for RAM, Intel will choose two options: 8 channels of DDR5 without ECC or 4 channels with ECC, not currently defined by the platform segment. This means that there could be processors under the same architecture with or without ECC for the same card or the same chipset.
On the other hand, the use of 64 PCIe 5.0 lanes which apparently will be for the entire range of processors. Regarding prices, segmentation would start to 1000 dollars and could be extended to the top of the range up to 3000 dollars, costs that undoubtedly separate the average player from these platforms and undoubtedly direct him more towards professionals.
When will they arrive? In principle and if nothing fails in the middle of next year, but there are rumors of some delays in the third quarter of 2022, so for now and with the current situation we have a 3 month GAP where AMD will be able to play its chips with EPYC Milan -X and Threadripper.
