'Sapphire Rapids' Unveiled: Intel Xeon W-3400 Workstation CPUs Pack Up to 56 Cores

pcmag.com:

The core counts on Intel’s mainstream desktop processors have been shooting up to the sky, and unsurprisingly so are those on Intel’s new high-end Xeon workstation processors, dubbed "Sapphire Rapids" during development. Today, Intel announced the new Xeon W-3400 and Xeon W-2400 product lines as part of the delayed Sapphire Rapids family, with the W-3400 line supporting up to 56 CPU cores, making for Intel’s single fastest workstation processor to date.

The launch of the Sapphire Rapids chips, built on the Intel 7 process technology, was originally slated for 2022. These new Xeon processors make use of the "Golden Cove" microarchitecture that is also featured inside of Intel’s consumer-oriented 13th Gen Core desktop processors (known as "Raptor Lake"). In terms of design, however, these chips are considerably different from Raptor Lake processors and should provide significantly better performance in workstation-relevant applications.

The Sapphire Rapids Xeons, also dubbed "Sapphire Rapids-WS" to distinguish them from coming server versions, compete in the market for workstation chips that primarily appear in prebuilt workstation desktops from the large OEMs. They'll play in that market alongside offerings from AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro family. The competition includes muscle silicon such as AMD's flagship 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX, which we tested last year in the Lenovo ThinkStation P620.

Unlike the new Xeon workstation processors, Raptor Lake consumer processors have two types of processor cores inside of them. The stars are the high-performance cores known as Performance cores (P-cores), but these are backed by high-efficiency cores known as Efficient cores (E-cores). Intel’s top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K