We’ve told you a number of times before about Intel’s return to the HEDT processor market with Sapphire Rapids-X, but it turns out there’s some big news on what has already been rebranded as Xeon Workstation as its specs. techniques and the number of cores that will integrate. Let’s see what Intel’s response to AMD’s Threadripper looks like.
The HEDT PC market is in a strange vacuum, as for the vast majority of business users, the power provided by a high-end desktop processor is sufficient for their needs. What caused this? Well, on the Intel side, we haven’t noticed a processor of these features since Ice Lake-X launched in 2020.
The launch of the Sapphire Rapids-X is expected in 2022, which is also codenamed Fishwalk, a version of the upcoming Intel Xeon designed for workstations. We were already familiar with this processor, but it is in the last few hours that new details have leaked.
Xeon Workstation, Intel’s return to HEDT
The launch of the Xeon Sapphire Rapids could take place in the third quarter of 2022, both in its version for servers and data centers, as in that of workstations. Although they are based on the same architecture as they are intended for differentiated markets, they will use different sockets and trade names, coinciding with Xeon’s use for the name, however, he adds the name of Workstation family for HEDT models. The rebranding is significant because it means it won’t be called Sapphire Rapids-X, which means the end of an era for Intel.
And what is the configuration of the first generation of the Xeon workstation? As in the Intel Core 12 for desktop and the Sapphire Rapids for servers, we will be using Golden Cove cores such as P-Cores, although unlike the processor with Alder Lake-S architecture, we will not see the usage. from E-Cores. And what does the specifications say? Well, up to 56 cores faster than 4 GHz, split into 14 cores for each of the 4 tiles that make up the CPU.
However, each of the four tiles seems to have the memory controller shortened compared to the server version, since it talks about 8 channels DDR5-4400 with ECC support. Let’s not forget that DDR5 is dual channel memory per DIMM, so that makes a total of 4 DIMMs per card. The other cut is linked to the implementation of certain units such as the Data Streaming Accelerator which, according to rumors, will be exclusive to the server version.
They will also have a cheap version
Rumors suggest that 28-core and 36-core versions will appear, so we might see 2 and 3 tile configurations in total. For these versions, the number of memory channels will remain at 8, but they will lose ECC memory support, although they are still in the design phase and internally 4 channels with error correction support would have been offered. . The number of channels being linked to the number of tiles, it is logical to think that depending on the configuration it will be variable.
