There are two branches that will be well differentiated within the same architecture, such as Sapphire Rapids. It appears that Intel is going to segment the market into HEDT and Workstation to hit its rival much better and stronger, and within these there will be a greater range of processors, so everything can happen as we will see below.
Sapphire Rapids WorkStation Platform
What can we expect here? We are talking about the successor to the Xeon Ice Lake-X, the so controversial processors that have ended up succumbing to the EPYC and that as such, although they gave war, AMD’s push has ended up pushing them in sales to a corner little by little. Intel continues to sell them at a good pace, but AMD is recovering ground at forced marches and therefore they need a “resfresh”.
Said refresh will arrive with this new architecture and with some data that we already revealed some time ago, such as the 56 cores with frequencies above 4 GHz. Today we have more data about them, such as the fact that there will be versions of 12 cores, which is perfect for small servers and localized workloads.
The maximum TDP being tested is 350 watts, so in principle there would be room for improvement in the frequencies, although we do not 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 it could be from 4,800 MT / s, all under ECC as tradition dictates.
On the other hand, the 112 lanes PCIe 5.0 and the support of a single CPU per motherboard, so there will no longer be dual slot configurations as such, a move that could be controversial, as well as the fact that some accelerators may not work on these Workstations, possibly 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 Mainstream
Here we talk 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? Well, starting with a few settings between 28 and 36 cores in MCC configuration (it is not at all clear) being the first possibly the most plausible option, where the frequencies will mark everything.
The 10 nm 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. Possibly the top of the range will not run at the maximum frequency of the series as usual. The TDP will be controversial once again as it is estimated to be between 270 watts and 400 watts, with the current consumption of the Samplers being less than 300 watts, so there is room to continue scaling as in the case of Workstations.
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 ECC or without ECC for the same or different board or chipset.
On the other hand, the use of 64 lanes PCIe 5.0 which apparently will be for the entire range of processors. Regarding prices, the segmentation would start at 1000 dollars and could be extended to the top of the range up to 3000 dollars, costs that undoubtedly separate the average gamer from these platforms and orient them more towards professionals without a doubt.
When will they arrive? In principle and if nothing fails in the middle of next year, but there are rumors of some delays to the third quarter of 2022, so for now and with the current situation we have a GAP of 3 months where AMD will be able to play its chips with EPYC Milan -X and Threadripper.
