Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon processors will be suffering another delay, pushing the company’s first chiplet design into 2023, claims veteran journalist Igor Wallossek. According to Igor, up until now, the first wave of volume Sapphire Rapids-SP shipments was slated to reach customers and partners in the second half of 2022. However, according to a new internal memo, the next-gen Xeon server processors have been delayed (for the nth time) to Feb or/and March.
Igor states that Intel has set a “launch window” for Sapphire Rapids for the calendar week 6 to 9 that corresponds from 6th February to March 3rd, 2023. Early shipments are still planned to reach select clients in the latter half of 2022 in two waves. Dual-socket (2S) SKUs will be shipped during week 42 and quad and octa-socket (4S & 8S) parts in the 45th week of 2022.
Sapphire Rapids-SP will be the first chiplet/modular design from Intel with a total core count of up to 60, distributed across four 20-core dies. These dies communicate with each other using the EMIB interconnect and leverage the Intel 7 process node. It’s worth noting that while AMD’s contemporary server designs, namely Milan and Milan-X are based on TSMC’s 7nm node, SPR will be Genoa’s rival. The 4th Gen Epyc parts will pack up to 96 cores across twelve 5nm chiplets with support for DDR5, PCIe Gen 5 as well as AVX-512.
Emerald Rapids, the successor to Sapphire is also going to get delayed by six to ten months at the very least. There’s no way Intel will be able to manage a 2023 launch because that’s when Sapphire is landing. This puts Intel’s Xeon roadmap on the backfoot as every new generation will already be a few years old compared to the completion, at least till Granite Rapids.
Source: Igor’s Lab
