Intel Xeon W-2500 workstation processors

A brilliant choice for video encoding, but it fails to land a knockout punch against tough Threadripper competition

- JAMES MORRIS

PRICE Xeon w7-2595X, £1,681 (£2,017 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk

I If you read our recent workstations Labs (see issue 361, p78), you'll know that AMD lorded over Intel thanks to its latest Pro and non-Pro Threadripper chips. Intel has finally released a new family of workstation chips - the Xeon W-3500 and W-2500 series that it hopes will redress the balance. It's based on Intel's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" architecture, and we put a sample CPU through its paces to see if AMD has anything to worry about.

To be precise, Intel sent us the Intel Xeon w7-2595X. This is the top of the 2500-series range, with 26 cores that all support Hyper-Threading, delivering 52 threads. The base clock is 2.8GHz, with Intel's Turbo Boost Max technology pushing it up to 4.8GHz. Intel first released chips based on Sapphire Rapids at the beginning of 2023, so it's a surprise that we have our first look at it in workstation form towards the end of 2024. Admittedly, Intel released the Xeon W-2400 family at the end of 2023, but draw your own conclusions from the fact that no manufacturers decided to send us workstations based on it.

Die hard

Sapphire Rapids is manufactured using a process called Intel 7. AMD has been producing CPUs and GPUs with a 7nm process since 2018, and is now on 5nm with its production silicon, so you may be surprised to discover that Intel 7 uses Intel's 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process. However, Intel claims it's equivalent to TSMC's 7nm one - AMD relies on the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC - hence the Intel 7 name. (Intel still runs its own fabs and reckons its 7nm process will be equivalent to TSMC's 4nm process, so will be called Intel 4.) There are two versions of Sapphire Rapids. One uses a single die (MCC), while the other packages multiple dies together (XCC). The latter is like the approach taken by AMD with its Zen architecture for its Ryzen processors.