According to foreign media wccftech, AMD launched the Threadripper (Ripper) series with great success, and in the case of dominating the high-end processor platform, Intel has not moved in this regard for a long time.
In the absence of a competitive rival, AMD's successor products were only perfunctory on the "Threadripper WX" workstation processor.
However, the media said that later this year, AMD is expected to launch a next-generation HEDT product line based on the Zen3 architecture. Intel's side has also responded, and will also launch a golden Cove architecture processor.
It was also revealed that Intel is planning to launch a new lineup of Sapphire Rapids-AP, positioning the HEDT-X platform, which will be delegated to the desktop platform. But if the news is reliable, it will be launched at the end of this year.
In particular, the "AP" suffix has also been used in the flagship Cascade Lake-AP product line with MCM multi-chip solutions. Previously, the Sapphire Rapids-SP series had been designed with 4 sets of MCM, each with up to 15 cores (but only 14 enabled).
So in a sense, Sapphire Rapids-SP can also be seen as a derivative of AP, and Intel also decided to sell its HEDT product line with the APs (not X) suffix.
In addition, Intel plans to further segment the Sapphire Rapids HEDT market to cover both workstation and mainstream workstation platforms.
On workstation platforms, Intel also plans to replace the Sapphire Rapids HEDT platform in 2020 with Xeon CPUs based on the Ice Lake-W architecture, which will have up to 56 Golden Cove cores (12 cores at the entry level) and turbo frequencies above 4GHz, with the flagship TDP power consumption up to 350W.
The foreign media also believes that the Sapphire Rapids Xeon workstation will have 4 SKUs and 3 different platform configurations, among which the sapphire Rapids-SP for the server market has versions with XCC and MCC chips, respectively, of which the MCC version supports 8 channels of DDR5 memory.
There are also Sapphire Rapids-112L for workstation MCC chips (with up to 112 PCIe 5.0 channels), and SPR-MSWS (only supports 4 channels of DDR5 memory).
In terms of price, the series is expected to be set at between US$3,000 and US$5,000 (about 19,000 to 32,000 rmb).
On mainstream workstations, there are also plans to replace Xeon-W processors based on Cascade Lake-X and Skylake-X architectures.
It is reported that the series has about 28-36 Golden Cove cores, and can be turbo frequency to 4.5-5.0GHz, of which the flagship TDP power consumption can reach 300W.
The platform will support DDR5 that supports 8 channels (non-ECC) and 4 channels (EEC), and PCIe 5.0 channels will be reduced to 64 channels.
The estimated price is about 500-3000 US dollars (about 3200 yuan to 19,000 yuan).
The Threadripper lineup has always been the undisputed king of HEDT and workstation CPUs, but with the launch of Sapphire Rapids, Intel has overtaken AMD and even been able to regain some market share.