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Intel Sapphire Rapids chips are now officially coming to workstations, the company has confirmed.
“Sapphire Rapids,” scheduled for release sometime in 2023, is the codename for the latest and greatest iteration of Intel’s CPUs, also known as 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
The chip giant says the move will give workstation users faster processing speeds than ever before promotional video (opens in new tab) claiming “it used to take a whole room full of computers to do what this does on its own, there goes my 30 minute coffee breaks”.
So, what do we actually know?
Despite the size of the news, Intel hasn’t officially revealed much about what the specs of the new Sapphire Rapids-powered workstations might be.
Unofficially, however, the new workstation CPUs could boast overclockable CPUs with up to 56 cores, eight memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes, according to data from hardware-league Enthusiastic Citizen reported by Tom’s Hardware. (opens in new tab)
Intel hasn’t given a timeline for the rollout, which may be a good thing, as Sapphire Rapids has already suffered several significant delays.
The new product lineup was originally slated for late 2021, but a series of delays, some related to pandemic-related disruptions, pushed the release date further and further (opens in new tab).
But it’s not just workstations that will be super-powered by the forthcoming Sapphire Rapids technology, high-performance computing will also get a nod.
According to an press release (opens in new tab) the chip giant will soon be using Sapphire Rapids to power supercomputers, including Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora.
The machine will be powered by the Xeon Max CPU, an x86-based processor, Intel’s highest density processor and reportedly packed in more than 100 billion transistors in a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high – bandwidth memory.
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