Intel Sapphire Rapids
When Intel publicly unveiled its CPU roadmap and respective microarchitectures last August, it did not formally confirm that Sapphire Rapids processors will use Golden Cove cores. For some reason, Intel has not provided further clarification regarding this for several months and only this week has made a statement.Indeed, Andi Kleen, a Linux engineer who works at Intel, said:
Sapphire Rapids uses Golden Cove, not Willow Cove.
The design of the CPU cores (which depends on the microarchitecture) is closely linked to the manufacturing process (and vice versa) as it defines the performance of the transistors, power delivery and power consumption. Porting a processor core from one node to another is possible, but generally not a good idea as its performance and power characteristics change significantly. For example, because Intel's Ice Lake / Willow Cove cores were originally developed for the company's second-generation 10nm manufacturing node, Intel never took its Ice Lake-SP CPU to the more advanced 10nm SuperFin process.
Intel has always planned to use its 10nm Enhanced SuperFin node for its Alder Lake processors, based on the Golden Cove microarchitecture and dedicated to consumer PCs, and Sapphire Rapids CPUs for servers and data centers. To that end, the confirmation that Intel's high-performance CPUs will be based on Golden Cove is hardly a surprise. The Alder Lake processors look pretty cool, and we're curious to see if they'll make it to our guide to the best PC CPUs as well.
The latest unofficial details on the fourth-generation Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable Processors indicate that the CPUs could have 72 to 80 cores, a significant increase over today's third-generation Ice Lake-SP Xeons which have " only ”up to 40 cores. In addition, the new CPUs will support PCIe 5.0 interface with CXL 1.1, as well as DDR5 and HBM2E memory.
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