Rumor: Intel Sapphire Rapids Server Processors Coming Early 2023

Intel’s Sapphire Rapids server CPUs may be out early next year. That is what tech website Igor’s Lab claims, which has gained access to internal NDA-Sights documents from the chipmaker. The processors would be released between weeks 6 and 9 of 2023.

Intel therefore plans to release Sapphire Rapids between February 6 and March 3, 2023, writes Igor Walllossek of Igor’s Lab, which has been more likely to share accurate information about unreleased hardware early on. According to Walllossek, this is evidenced by information from Intel’s NDA-Sights documents. Intel collects problems and errors with new processors.

There are now more than 500 entries about Sapphire Rapids, the website claims. There would already be twelve stepping, sort of revisions, of the upcoming server CPUs. A release was already planned at the end of 2021 and has now been postponed again, to early next year. Intel would still supply a number of ‘small’ Sapphire Rapids CPUs this year, for servers with a maximum of two sockets, to ‘a limited number of customers’.

Last week, Intel already discussed a postponement of Sapphire Rapids during the announcement of its quarterly results. The company found a security issue that needed to be fixed in the hardware. As a result, it had to overhaul the chip. The company confirmed at the time that this had an influence on the start of mass production. Intel said during the quarterly results itself that the first server chips are still on the roadmap for later this year, but was already talking about a larger-scale release in 2023.

Sapphire Rapids is Intel’s next generation of Xeon CPUs. With this, the company is switching for the first time to tiles, a kind of chiplets. The company provides each tile with 15 cores, for a total of up to 60. These are interconnected via emib, a kind of small bridges of silicon that are used as interconnect. The CPUs are made on the Intel 7 process, which was previously known as ’10nm Enhanced Superfin’. AMD’s upcoming Epyc CPUs, codenamed Genoa, are due out later this year and will have up to 96 cores on TSMC’s N5 node.