Intel Xeon W-3500 & W-2500 “Sapphire Rapids Refresh” Workstation CPU Lineup Confirmed

Intel seems to be ready to introduce its refreshed Sapphire Rapids "Xeon W-3500 & W-2500" workstation CPUs as confirmed by Dell & listed by online retailers.

The refreshed Intel Sapphire Rapids workstation CPU family is no mystery; we have already covered the lineup in detail. Now, Dell has listed support for these upcoming Xeon W-3500 & the Xeon W-2500 CPU lineup within the BIOS update for its Precision 7960 & 5860 workstation systems which will offer a drop-in upgrade to those who want to switch to the newer SKU.

In addition to Dell, the UK retailer, EET Group, has listed several Intel Xeon W3500 CPUs ahead of launch which include the W9-3575X, W7-3565X, W7-3555, W7-3545, W5-3525 & the W-3535X. Although no prices are mentioned, these chips are provided by Lenovo and their BIOS update and retail listing mean that we are very close to the official launch. For those who missed out on the specs in the previous post, we will run them down again.

Starting at the top, we have the Intel Xeon W-3500 "Sapphire Rapids-112L" refresh CPU family, consisting of 7 SKUs including the flagship W9-3595X. The Xeon W9-3595X features a total of 60 cores and 120 threads followed by the Xeon W9-3575X with 44 cores, W7-3565X with 32 cores, W7-3555 with 28 cores, W7-3545 with 24 cores, W5-3535X with 20 cores and W5-3525 with 16 cores. The CPU lineup TDPs range from 290W and up to 350W and feature-based clock speeds range from 2.2 to 3.2 GHz. Each CPU gets a slight core count bump over its predecessor which is shown below:

You can see that all of the Intel Xeon W-3500 SKUs except the W9-3575X feature a core count uplift of 4 cores while the Xeon W9-3575X features an increase of 8 cores. The increased core count also gives a small cache count increase.

Moving over to the Intel Xeon W-2500 "Sapphire Rapids-64L" refresh CPU family, we have at least 7 SKUs listed in the leak. Starting at the top, we have the Xeon W7-2595X with 26 cores, W7-2575X with 22 cores, W5-2565X with 18 cores, Xeon W5-2555X with 14 cores, Xeon W5-2545 with 12 cores, Xeon W3-2535 with 10 cores, and the Xeon W3-2525 with 8 cores. These chips have TDPs ranging from 175W and up to 250W with clocks ranging from 2.8 GHz and up to 3.5 GHz. Just like the Xeon W-3500 lineup, the Xeon W-2500 family also gets a core count bump though not as significant as the 3500 parts as seen below:

All SKUs get a nominal 2-core count uplift while the Xeon W7-2575X features a 4-core increase. All CPUs will be compatible with existing W790 HEDT and workstation motherboards with support of DDR5-4800 memory. The "X" SKUs will enable overclocking support and feature higher boost clock speeds. Since this is a refresh, we can expect Intel to price its Xeon W-3500 and Xeon W-2500 CPU family close to the existing W-3400 and W-2400 SKUs.

For a comparison perspective, AMD's Threadripper families are still the more disruptive platform, offering up to 96 cores, 192 threads, faster DDR5 memory support, unlocked OC design across all SKUs, an insane amount of Gen5 PCIe lanes and other I/O and great support on the TRX90 and the WRX90 motherboard platforms. AMD Threadripper CPUs also offer much better multi-threaded & general efficiency in workstation/HEDT-oriented tasks versus existing Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon offerings so it is unlikely that this refresh is going to change things much in the workstation field.

News Sources: Momomo_US #1, #2