Intel Reportedly Readying Prosumer Xeon Gold Workstation CPUs

With every generation of new processors, Intel has generally followed a set pattern of release. Each generation is launched by the consumer facing chips and low-end Xeons. A year later, the high-end E5 and E7 Xeons follow on the same process and architecture. This year’s Xeon is reportedly going to offer something of an in between, aimed squarely at the prosumer market.

From various unconfirmed reports, Intel is set to launch a new Xeon Gold lineup. These new Xeon Gold CPUs are meant to offer higher core counts than the usual HEDT platform which peaks right now at 10 cores. Users who want more would have to pay a very hefty premium for the E5 and E7s server and workstation class chips. However, there may be many prosumers who simply want a lot of cores without all of the expensive validation and enterprise features. This is where Xeon Gold comes in.

The first chip is the new Xeon Gold 6150 featuring 18 CPU cores, with HyperThreading for a total of 36 logical CPUs. L2 cache comes in at a hefty 1MB per core for 18MB and L3 is 24.75MB. Clock speeds are reported as 2.7 GHz base and 3.7 GHz boost. Of course, we have quad channel DDR4 memory as well. While it falls short of the top end E7 v4 chips which have 24 cores, it is a substantial upgrade over the HEDT platform. I also expect it will have many enterprise features like extra QPI links to be disabled as well as limited to single socket platforms. It will be interesting to see if this rumour turns out to be true and who would need such a CPU.