Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs and W790 chipset for it appear on roadmap

An Intel roadmap has been leaked that mentions consumer Sapphire Rapids processors. These are CPUs for high-end desktops, which will succeed Cascade Lake-X CPUs. The CPUs would appear in the second quarter of 2022.

The Sapphire Rapids CPUs for het should appear by the end of the second quarter of 2022, according to a roadmap held by VideoCardz. Such hedt CPUs are intended for consumers, for example for use in workstations. Intel currently offers Cascade Lake-X processors in that market segment, which were introduced in 2019. Current Cascade Lake-X CPUs are built on Intel’s 14nm node and offer up to 18 cores. Sapphire Rapids is produced on Intel’s 10nm process and is expected to have a higher core count.

The roadmap also mentions an Intel W790 chipset. This suggests that Intel is adjusting the naming for its hedt chipsets. Chipsets of previous hedt CPUs from the manufacturer had an X prefix, such as X299. W-series chipsets are typically reserved for Xeon CPUs.

Intel has not yet officially announced the upcoming HEDT processors, so specific specifications are not yet known. However, the company has already unveiled a Sapphire Rapids platform for servers and data centers. That server platform was initially planned for this year, but Intel announced this week that the company will postpone the production of those CPUs until 2021. More large-scale production will start a quarter later and the processors would therefore become available in the first half of 2022.

The Sapphire Rapids server platform will receive support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, Intel previously confirmed. The company will also release some Sapphire Rapids models next year integrated HBM memory for enterprise and data center customers in the Xeon Scalable series, but it is not known whether such memory modules will also be available for the hedt version of Sapphire Rapids.

Source: Sapphire Rapids