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

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

The Sapphire Rapids CPUs for hedt are expected to arrive by the end of the second quarter of 2022, according to a roadmap owned 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. That suggests that Intel is changing the naming convention for its hedt chipsets. Chipsets of the manufacturer’s previous hedt CPUs 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 concrete 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 is delaying production of those CPUs until 2021. More large-scale production will start a quarter later and the processors should be ready in the first half of 2022. become available.

The Sapphire Rapids server platform will receive support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, Intel previously confirmed. The company will also launch some Sapphire Rapids models with integrated HBM memory for enterprise and data center customers in the Xeon Scalable series next year, but it is unknown whether such memory modules will also be available for the hedt version of Sapphire Rapids.

Source: Sapphire Rapids