Intel is the semiconductor manufacturing market leader and has held the crown as the best for three decades. Recently, however, the company seems to be losing its footing in the silicon market, with competitors like Advanced Micro Systems pushing forward with next-generation processors in the desktop and data center market. Intel seems to be desperately trying to make a comeback in the semiconductor market.
A leak made by Videocardz reveals intel’s roadmap for its Xeon platform. The alleged roadmap addresses the wafer manufacturers several plans for its Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapid Chipsets. The roadmap states that the Ice Lake SoCs will be launched in the first quarter of 2021, while the Sapphire Rapids will be found in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Intel Ice Lake is based on a 10nm design and seems to be missing a lot of features. Sapphire Rapids, on the other hand, are the high-performance architectures from Intel. The Ice Lake chipsets will only be running until Intel finally gets its 10nm SuperFin Enhanced process up and running in its labs.
The wafer manufacturer had confirmed the launch of its Sapphire Rapids CPU platform in the year 2021. The architecture will feature DDR5 memory support and PCIe 5.0, making the processor truly next-generation among its competitors. The addition of the CXL 1.1 will increase Sapphire Rapid architecture’s demand in the data center chip market.
Sapphire Rapids will consist of 4 CPU tiles with 14 cores each. The CPUs will contain 4 HBM2 stacks with a maximum memory of 64 GB (16GB each). The bandwidth offered from these stacks will be 1 TB/s. according to sources, the HBM2 and GDDR5 will be able to work together in flat, caching/2LM as well as in hybrid modes
Sources claim that the Sapphire Rapids will ship with 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes on the flagship parts and up to 64 routes for the rest. DDR5 memory up to 4800 MHz will be present as well for all its variants.
AMD is also gearing to launch new processors based on its next generation of Zen 3 processors and PCIe 5.0 support. As to how well the two rivals collide in the data center chip market remains to be seen.
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