Sapphire Rapids-based workstation CPUs from Intel are in the works and you might not have to wait long to get your hands on them. In a teaser video shared on Twitter, two Intel employees are seen talking tech. Midway through, the guy turns to his coworker and asks about her new Sapphire Rapids system. She comments on how ridiculous it is, adding that it used to take a whole room full of computers to do what the system can now accomplish on its own. “There go my 30-minute rendering coffee breaks,” she quips. When asked about shipping, the lady said she was in a meeting recently and learned that final test runs are coming back “really good,” meaning they are likely to ship out “pretty soon.” Bad acting aside, it’s a good sign that Intel is officially talking about these parts. As VideoCardz highlights, Sapphire Rapids-WS (codenamed Fishhawk Falls) is viewed as Intel’s response to AMD’s Threadripper Pro series workstation chips. They’ll use Intel’s new W790 platform with an LGA-4677 socket, with the higher-end W-3400 CPUs expected to support 112 PCIe lanes and eight channels of DDR5-4800.
Intel is set to host a launch event for Sapphire Rapids on January 10, just a couple of days after the Consumer Electronics Show wraps up in Las Vegas. Presumably, this launch will focus more on the server side of things. It seems like CES would be the ideal stage for a launch event, what with the entire tech community in town, but I digress. Last month, AMD announced its fourth generation of Epyc data center processors headlined by the Epyc 9654 with 96 cores, 192 threads, 384MB of L3 cache and a 360W TDP. The cost? Nearly $12,000.
