Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
It’s been literally years in the making, but the fourth generation Xeon CPU is finally here. Sapphire Rapids was released to much.. Applause?
The chip has some interesting things going for it. It’s got a max of 60 cores, higher than last gen’s max of 40 (reminder that the latest AMD’s can do 96), a pay-as-you-go model for 4 different on chip accelerators (can’t wait to see how fast that gets hacked), PCIe 5 and DDR5 compatibility, and what we’ve all been waiting for - a CXL 1.1 interface.
There are a dizzying 52 models to choose from, with prices going from a low of $415 to a peak of $17,000. That $17k gets you the 8490H with all the fixins- 60 cores and 120 threads, with all four accelerator types fully enabled. The chip also has 112.5 MB of L3 cache and a 350W Thermal Design Power rating. (That means it runs super hot.) Intel also released a new GPU series called Ponte Vecchio. I’d love to tell you more about it but that’s literally everything the article says.
Oh, Intel also released a new i9 codenamed Raptor Lake. This is a tweak on the already out there i9-13900K chip, but it adds a P-core Turbo capability of hitting 6GHz. All it takes is ALL THE POWER ON EARTH. Seriously, this thing’s base draw is 150W , and it’s max draw is an absurd 320W. What kind of power supply do they think we all have these days? All that for a reasonable $699 base price.
Interesting that with Ryzen, AMD is showing the kind of performance that you can get from low power, where Intel is content to brag about just blasting more electrons down the wires of their old stuff and calling it a win.