The company has confirmed that Intel Sapphire Rapids chips are now officially available in workstations.
Launched at some point in 2023, “Sapphire Rapids” is the code name for Intel’s newest and largest iteration of processors, also known as the fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
The chip giant says the move will give workstation users faster processing speeds than ever before, a promotion movie (opens in a new tab) claiming that “doing what it does on its own took up a whole room full of computers, here are my 30-minute coffee rendering breaks.”
What do we actually know?
Despite the scale of the news, Intel has not officially revealed much about the specifications of the new workstations with Sapphire Rapids processors.
However, unofficially, the new workstation processors boast overclockable CPUs with up to 56 cores, eight memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes, according to hardware leak Enthusiastic Citizen reported by Tom’s Hardware. (opens in a new tab)
Intel didn’t provide a rollout timeline, which might as well be because Sapphire Rapids has already been plagued by several significant delays.
The lineup of new products was originally set for late 2021 before a series of delays, some related to the pandemic disruption, kept pushing the release date back (opens in a new tab).
But not only are workstations set to be boosted by Sapphire Rapids’ upcoming tech, high-performance PCs will also receive a nod.
According press release (opens in a new tab) by the chip giant, Sapphire Rapids will soon be used to power supercomputers, including Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora.
The machine is said to be powered by the Xeon Max processor, an x86-based processor that is Intel’s highest-density processor and is said to contain over 100 billion transistors in a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high-bandwidth memory.
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