Rumor: Intel Sapphire Rapids server processors coming out in early 2023

Intel’s Sapphire Rapids server CPUs may be out early next year. That is the claim of tech website Igor’s Lab, which has obtained 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 in the past has often shared correct information about unreleased hardware at an early stage. 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 steps, some kind of revisions, of the upcoming server CPUs. A release was already planned for the end of 2021 and has now been postponed again to early next year. Intel would this year still supply a number of ‘small’ Sapphire Rapids CPUs, for servers with a maximum of two sockets, to ‘a limited number of customers’.

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

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