Intel Confirms Sapphire Rapids Coming to Workstations

Intel, late on Tuesday, officially confirmed that its Sapphire Rapids processors are coming to workstations in a teaser video published on Twitter. This is the first official confirmation that the company intends to address this market with its upcoming Sapphire Rapids CPUs. However, Intel is still tight-lipped about the specifications of these upcoming products.

“This thing is ridiculous, it used to take whole room full of computers to do what this is doing on its own, there go my 30-minute rendering coffee breaks,” says a lady in the video. “I was on a meeting the other day and our final test runs are coming back really good, so I’d say pretty soon. You should probably take that coffee break while you still can.  

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Based on the latest leaks, Intel will market its Sapphire Rapids-WS CPUs (at least, this is how they are called for now, unofficially) under the Xeon W 3400-series name. These processors will use Intel’s all-new W790 platform and offer up to 56 cores, eight DDR5 memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes. In addition, the CPUs are set to be based on high-performance Golden Cove-derived cores with AVX-512 and AMX instructions enabled.

Many Sapphire Rapids-WS SKUs — including the flagship Xeon W9-3495X — will come with an unlocked multiplier and thus be overclockable. The 56-core range-topping model will be the industry’s first overclockable CPU for powerful workstations released in years. Intel and AMD essentially abandoned this market and focused on more traditional workstations that never get overclocked.

A rumor is that Intel plans to release its Sapphire Rapids-WS processors next Spring after it first ships Xeon Scalable ‘Sapphire Rapids’ products for servers. So far, Intel has not confirmed any timeframes for its workstation-grade Xeon W 3400-series products, but at least it clearly stated that Sapphire Rapids is coming to workstations.