Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids)
More cores, more PCIe lanes, and support for next-gen interfaces.
We received an anonymous tip with a slide featuring Intel’s future Xeon platform specifications. The slide is dated, as it still lists the Ice Lake server as a 2020 product, however it seems that the rest of the information is correct.
Intel Xeon Scalable Roadmap and Specifications, Source: VideoCardz
Sapphire Rapids features 10nm Enhanced SuperFin architecture and it will be offered for both servers (Sapphire Rapids-SP) and high-end desktops (Sapphire Rapids-X). Not much is known about the latter, other than we have heard that the motherboards for the next X-series are already being sampled. On the other hand, Intel is quite open about its Sapphire Rapids-SP platform with its future customers.
The slide confirms that Sapphire Rapids is now planned up to 56 cores and it will scale from one to eight sockets, just as Cascade Lake. We also have confirmation on the maximum TDP of 350W. This was long speculated and has already appeared in other leaks (see below). It’s a 100W power increase over Cooper Lake and 70W more than just released Ice Lake-SP.
Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable will support DDR5 up to 4800 MHz (1 DIMM per channel). The platform will support up to 80 PCI Express lanes. According to the slide, the CPUs will support PCI Gen5 x16, x8, x4, and PCI Gen4 x2. Unlike the previous Xeon CPUs series, Sapphire Rapids will introduce on-package 64GB HBM2 memory with bandwidth up to 1 TB/s per socket.
Finally, we have confirmation on AMX extended x86 instruction support, which was already communicated by Intel before. Sapphire Rapids will support AMX/TMUL (Int8 and BFloat16) instructions.
The core count and maximum TDP information have recently been spotted by @momomo_us, who revealed the following information:
Intel Sapphire Rapids Engineering Samples, Source: @momomo_us
This list confirms that the top 56 core SKU will have a TDP of 350W, but it also extends on this information by providing TDP for 44 core (270W) and 24 core variants (225W).
We should note that the specifications of Sapphire Rapids were correctly predicted by AdoredTV back in October 2020:
Intel Sapphire Rapids Specs, Source: AdoredTV
