As promised earlier this month, Intel has now launched the new Xeon workstation processors. It starts with the Intel Xeon W-3400 and Intel Xeon W-2400 families of chips. They include the Xeon W9-3495X chip, which the company has already named "Intel’s most powerful desktop workstation processor ever designed."
That particilar processor, using the Sapphire Rapids silicon design, has 56 cores inside, running on 105 megabytes of L3 cache. Its normal clock speed is 1.9 GHz but it can achieve speeds of up to 4.8 GHz with Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0. It"s also, as you might guess, extremely expensive. The Xeon W9-3495X is currently priced by Intel at a whopping $5,889. By contrast, the least expensive chip in this lineup, the Xeon W3-2423, is priced at just $359.
Overall, the new chips support up to 12 CPU PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes for the Xeon W-3400 processors and up to 64 CPU PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes with the Xeon W-2400 chips. The new Xeons also support a high degree of overclocking, thanks in part to the use of DDR5 XMP 3.0 RDIMM memory overclocking options.
The new chips are available to pre-order starting today, and they will be included in workstation PCs starting sometime in March.