Sapphire Rapids has been in the air in recent times, and now we are getting more leaks. The new development of the Intel’s 4th generation Xeon processor has been the first leaked CPU images. YuuKi-AnS, a leaker, shared the first picture of the Sapphire Rapids-SP CPU based on Intel’s 10nm processor. The chip is known with a codename of ‘QVV5’ and will be used on the Eagle Stream platform.
The next-gen Sapphire Rapids chips offer quite impressive specifications. This chip would be the first chip that supports PCI Express 5.0. Besides that, it also features an onboard HBM memory card and Computes Express Link 1.1. As per expectations, it’s going to be the first architecture to support DDR5 memory, but a rumour suggests that it will support up to 8-channel memory. By the end of 2021, it looks like Intel wants to shift entirely to DDR5 on all platforms making a start with the Alder Lake platform.
The above picture of the Sapphire Rapids-SP CPU is an engineering sample with a base clock of 1.3 GHz. This chip is based on the third refinement of Intel’s 10nm process technology named 10nm Enhanced SuperFin. The leaker informed that the CPU would use four compute cores along with four HBM stacks.
The Sapphire Rapids will be used in the next-gen HPC platforms, mainly Intel’s own Aurora supercomputer. We can expect that the Aurora will be equipped with two Sapphire Rapids processors paired besides six Ponte Vecchio GPUs. At CES 2021, Intel had confirmed the development of 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors. All of these are still rumours, nothing is confirmed officially yet.
