For all of the singular focus that Intel has placed on its consumer Core desktop CPU parts in the last few years, you could be forgiven for thinking that Intel has forgotten about their Xeon premium processor lineups for workstations. Between the de facto retirement of Intel’s desktop-grade Xeon W-1x00-series lineup, and the repeated delays of Intel’s current-generation big silicon parts for servers, the Sapphire Rapids-based 4th Generation Xeon Scalable series, there hasn’t been much noise from Intel in the workstation space in the last few years. But now that Sapphire Rapids for servers has finally launched, the logjam in Intel’s product roadmap has at last cleared out, and Intel is finally in a position to resume cascading their latest silicon into new workstation parts.
This morning Intel is announcing their first top-to-bottom refresh of workstation parts, the Xeon W-3400 and Xeon W-2400 series. Aimed at what Intel is broadly classifying as the Expert Workstation and Mainstream Workstation markets respectively, these chip lineups are intended for use in high-performance desktop workstation setups, particularly those that require more CPU cores, more PCIe lanes, more memory bandwidth, or a combination of all three elements. Based on the same Sapphire Rapids silicon as Intel’s recently-launched server parts, the new Xeon W SKUs will bring down many (but not all) of the features that have come to define Intel’s leading-edge server silicon, along with a new chipset and motherboards that are more suitable for use in high-performance workstations.
