The Intel Xeon Silver 4116 is a server/workstation processor with 12 cores, launched in July 2017. It is part of the Xeon Silver lineup, using the Skylake-SP architecture with Socket 3647. Thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading the core-count is effectively doubled, to 24 threads. To further increase overall system performance, up to two Xeon Silver 4116 CPUs can link up in a multi-processor (SMP) configuration. Xeon Silver 4116 has 16.5 MB of L3 cache and operates at 2.1 GHz by default, but can boost up to 3 GHz, depending on the workload. Intel is building the Xeon Silver 4116 on a 14 nm production process using 8,000 million transistors. The multiplier is locked on Xeon Silver 4116, which limits its overclocking capabilities.
With a TDP of 85 W, the Xeon Silver 4116 consumes a good deal of power, so decent cooling is needed. Intel's processor supports DDR4 memory. ECC memory is supported, too, which is an important capability for mission-critical systems, to avoid data corruption. This processor lacks integrated graphics, you might need a graphics card.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Xeon Silver 4116, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Additionally, IOMMU virtualization (PCI passthrough) is supported, so that guest virtual machines may directly use host hardware. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, Intel is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512.