The business has verified that the Intel Sapphire Rapids processors are really planned for workstations.

“Sapphire Rapids” is Intel’s codename for their next-gen CPUs, the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which are scheduled for availability in 2023.

Promoting that “it used to take an entire room full of computers to achieve what this is doing on its own, there go my 30-minute rendering coffee breaks,” the chip manufacturer claims that the change will provide workstation users with faster processing rates than ever before.

What do we know, then?

Despite the magnitude of the announcement, Intel has been very tight-lipped about the potential features of the new Sapphire Rapids-powered workstations.

According to information leaked by Enthusiastic Citizen, the upcoming workstation CPUs may include up to 56 overclockable cores, eight memory channels, and 112 PCIe lanes. This link opens in a new window/tab.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Intel didn’t reveal when the deployment will begin, considering Sapphire Rapids has already been plagued by many substantial delays.

The intended delivery date for the new product line-up was late 2021, however it was repeatedly pushed back due to a number of factors, some of which were pandemic-related problems (opens in new tab).

But it’s not only workstations that are going to be superpowered by the new Sapphire Rapids technology, high-performance computing is also slated to receive a nod.

The chipmaker has announced that its new Sapphire Rapids chips will soon be powering supercomputers like Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory.

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