Intel Sapphire Rapids chips confirmed to be supercharging your next workstation

Intel Sapphire Rapids chips are now officially set to be coming to workstations, the company has confirmed.

Pencilled in for release at some point in 2023, "Sapphire Rapids" is the code name for the latest and greatest iteration of Intel's CPUs, which are otherwise known as 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The chip giant says the move will give workstation users greater processing speeds than ever before, a promotional video claiming "it used to take a whole room full of computers to do what this is doing on its own, there go my 30-minute rendering coffee breaks".

So, what do we actually know?

Despite the scale of the news, Intel did not officially reveal very much about what the specs of the new Sapphire Rapids-powered workstations could 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 leaker Enthusiastic Citizen reported by Tom's Hardware. 

Intel didn't provide a timeline for the rollout will take place, which might be just as well, as Sapphire Rapids has been beset by several significant delays already.

The new products line-up had originally been set for late 2021, before a series of delays, some of which related to pandemic-related disruptions, kept pushing the release date back. 

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But it's not just workstations that are set to be superpowered by the upcoming Sapphire Rapids technology, high performance computing is also set to get a nod.

According to a press release by the chip giant, Sapphire Rapids will soon be used to power supercomputers, including the Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora.

The machine is set to be powered by the Xeon Max CPU, an x86-based processor, which is Intel’s highest-density processor and reportedly packs in over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high-bandwidth memory. 

• Interested in getting improved performance without opting for a workstation? Check out if any of our best business laptops fit the bill.

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