Intel Scoops Out Five Flavours Of Ice Lake Xeons For Workstations

Intel's ten-nanometre Ice Lake architecture has landed in Xeon processors for workstations.

The W-3300 processors top out at 38 cores and 76 threads, with base clock speeds of 3.5GHz. Turbo mode can hit 4.0GHz in a single core in three of the five new CPUS Intel is offering. Other models in the range can sustain 3.7GHz Turbo operations across all cores.

The two big steps up from previous workstation-class Xeons concern memory and cache size.

Memory capacity has climbed to four terabytes of eight-channel DDR4-3200, while memory bandwidth has reached 3200 MegaTransfers per second. Caches of up to 1.5MB per core are on offer.

PCIe 4.0 is another upgrade from the Skylake-based W-3200 range.

Here's all the members of the Ice Lake range in detail:

Intel's W-3300 Workstation Xeon range.

Click to enlarge

Obviously, Intel says the new models are faster than their predecessors and will therefore save you time when using the demanding applications that workstation users employ.

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The CPUs should be on sale now from your favourite silicon-slinger or system builder. Chipzilla says that every time it launches new chips, but usually backs it up with a list of new machines from top-tier vendors.

On this occasion none of the big names – Dell, HP Inc and Lenovo – appear to have new models ready to roll with the W-3300 inside. That's almost certainly not a comment on the W-3300 range having landed with an unpleasant wet smack, but rather a reflection that the workstation market is not massive and system-makers' priorities are elsewhere.

Word of the shiny new CPUs will, however, be welcome. The prospect of workstation upgrades gets resellers excited, because the nature of the workloads they run often drives other upgrades to a greater degree than PC replacements. ®