It turns out that the 60-core Xeon W9-3595X leak from last week is part of a 14-SKU mid-lifecycle refresh of the Xeon W LGA4677 series targeting the workstation and HEDT markets. The underlying microarchitecture and silicon at the heart of these is "Sapphire Rapids Refresh," it's essentially the same as "Sapphire Rapids," but with CPU core-count increases across the SKUs. If you recall, the "Sapphire Rapids" MCM has a maximum core-count of 60-core/120-thread which is maxed out in Xeon Scalable server processors, but only hit up to 56-core/112-thread with the original W3400 and W2400 series HEDT/workstation chips. This unused 4-core headroom, combined with increases in clock speeds, is how Intel plans to create these 14 SKUs across the new W3500 and W2500 product lines.

As with the original W3400 and W2400 series; what set the W3500 series chips apart from the W2500 series, is the I/O. The W3500 series gets 8-channel DDR5 memory and 128 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, while the W2500 series chips get 4-channel DDR5 memory and 64 PCIe Gen 5 lanes. As we mentioned, this refresh is all about increasing the CPU core counts at existing price points. The top W9-3595X is a 60-core/120-thread chip, compared to the 56-core/112-thread W9-3495X it's replacing. The new W9-3575X gets a massive 8-core uplift, and is now a 44-core/88-thread processor, compared to the 36-core/72-thread W9-3475X. The W7-3565X is 32-core/64-thread, compared to the 28-core/56-thread W7-3465X.The W7-3555 and W7-3545 are 28-core/56-thread and 24-core/48-thread; coming in a price points comparable to the W7-3455 and W7-3445, which are 24-core/48-thread and 20-core/40-thread, respectively. At the "entry level," are the W5-3535X 20-core/40-thread replacing the W5-3435X that's a 16-core/32-thread chip; and the new W5-3525 that's a 16-core/32-thread chip succeeding the 12-core/24-thread 3425. Besides the CPU core count increases, each SKU gets a 100-200 MHz speed bump to step up their single-thread performance by a bit.

The story repeats with the new W2500 series, although the CPU core-count increases are just by 2 cores across the board; the series tops out at 26-core/52-thread, although we'd have loved to see a 30-core/60-thread part. Both the W2500 and W2400 series are based on a single-tile variant of "Sapphire Rapids" that physically contains 30 CPU cores, 56 MB of shared L3 cache, 4x DDR5 memory channels, and a 64-lane PCIe Gen 5 root.

The W2500 series lineup begins with the W3-2525 with a modest 8-core/16-thread count, compared to the 6-core/12-thread count of the W3-2423. Next up is the 10-core/20-thread W5-2535, compared to the 8-core/16-thread W5-2435. The W5-2545 is 12-core/24-thread, compared to the 10-core/20-thread W5-2445. The W5-2555X is a step up to 14-core/28-thread from the W5-2455X with its 12-core/24-thread count. A notch further up, we get the W5-2565X with its 18-core/36-thread CPU, compared to the 16-core/32-thread W5-2465X. At the top, we have the W7-2575X with 22-core/44-thread, which is a step up from the 20-core/40-thread W72475X; and finally the W7-2595X, with 26-core/52-thread on tap. Besides the 2-core increase across the board, there are similar 100-200 MHz speed bumps to the W3500 series.