Monday, August 1st 2022
Intel Moves Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" General Availability to February-March 2023
Intel is reportedly moving the general availability of its 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processor, codenamed "Sapphire Rapids," in the region of early-February to early-March, 2023. The enterprise processors were expected to debut toward the end of 2022, and some of the oldest company roadmaps referencing the processor put its launch back in Q1-2021. Igor's Lab reports that there are as many as 12 steppings of the processor, with the latest discovered being the E5 (the others being A0, A1, B0, C0, C1, C2, D0, E0, E2, E3 and E4; although these could be validation samples handed out to various large customers of Intel to try these chips with their various applications. Built on the Intel 7 node, the processor features up to 60 "Golden Cove" CPU cores, a DDR5 memory interface, PCI-Express Gen 5, and various on-die accelerators. Certain variants even feature up to 32 GB of on-package HBM.
Source:
Igor's Lab
19 Comments on Intel Moves Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" General Availability to February-March 2023
With 12 steppings before launch there must be some serious issues.
March 2017 - Zen 1 Epyc
March 2019 - Zen 2 Epyc
March 2021 - Zen 3 Epyc
March 2023 - Zen 4 Epyc
SPR was originally designed to go up against 64 core Zen 3 and released in 2021. In anticipation of SPR with HBM3, AMD prepared Zen 3 Epyc with 3D V-cache.
AMD successfully released all those Zen 3 Epycs with no sign of any SPR processors. That left Intel only with 28 core Cooper Lake for 1, 2, 4 and 8 socket systems and Ice Lake for 1 and 2 sockets. None of these processors except in cases of AVX512 4 and 8 socket servers, can come close to Zen 3 Epyc.
If and when SPR does come out, it will not be competitive against Zen 4 with AVX512 and 3D V-cache; not to mention 128 cores in Zen 4c. It will be some time before SPRs successor is ready. Intel will not have a competitive enterprise solution for years.
Intel interviewer: Is SPR delayed by 1.5 years due to a bug?
Pat: No
Intel interviewer: Is SPR delayed by 1.5 years due to 500 bugs?
Pat: Yes!
Said absolutely N..O..B..O..D...Y :D
Perhaps intel should try the opposite strategy of announcing release dates that are 2-5 years out, then if they somehow manage to get something ready sooner, they can announce it as "ahead of schedule" and make themselves look like a group that actually has their sh*t together & pushed hard to bring new stuff to market as fast as possible....
If things cool down (hopefully) and go back to "normal" I would agree with you.
AMD still have capacity issue but if the GPU market slow down, they could probably buy back from other company TSMC capacity to ship more EPYC.
Intel can still pack eight Alder Lake dies on the substrate. There's just enough space, and if not, they can break off the igpu and e-cores part. And somehow make it work like "64" cores. Worth trying if you can't do it any other way. Then sell it as Xeron, hoping that not everybody will note the typo.
Their old management have put them in a bad location and they will need a lot of time to recover the years they lost. I am not sure if they hit the bottom last quarter.
Nobody wants Hybrid CPUs in server which is a nightmare for VM applications.
www.techpowerup.com/235092/intel-says-amd-epyc-processors-glued-together-in-official-slide-deck
Seems the glue is weak on Intel side. :D