Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPUs Rumored To Hit Over 900W In Cinebench R23 Benchmark

Intel will soon be unveiling its Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPU family which will come in Xeon W-2400 & W-3400 flavors. While these chips are expected to bring a big performance jump over their predecessors (last seen in action with Ice Lake), rumors suggest that these chips will be super hungry when it comes to power consumption.

Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPUs Can Reportedly Consume Up To 900W of Power When Overclocked in Cinebench R23

According to Chiphell's Editor, nApoleon, the Intel Xeon Workstation CPUs seem to have no fixed wall when it comes to power consumption. Although he doesn't mention any particular SKU or the specific segment, it looks like this could be related to the higher-end Xeon W-3400 CPUs which are going to operate at a default TDP of 350W (PL1). These CPUs will also feature up to 56 cores, 112 threads, really high clock speeds, and 8-channel memory support.

It is stated that by default, the Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPUs can sip around 600W of power but overclocking just makes things go crazy. All Xeon Workstation "X" chips will feature an unlocked multiplier and can be overclocked like any other mainstream or HEDT CPU. With OC, the chips can hit up to 700W of power and consume more than 900 Watts in Cinebench R23. That's 2x the wattage that is currently consumed by NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card and is something that users should be concerned about if true.

Not only is that excess of power going to net you higher bills but it will also be stressful for the Intel W790 chipset motherboards too. Motherboard makers will have to put extra effort into designing the VRMs and cooling for their motherboards keeping this level of wattage in mind. One should be looking into investing a custom-loop cooling for the Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids Workstation CPUs because standard 360mm AIO coolers may not do the trick if you were to overclock these bad boys.

Even if this is just a rumor for now, we should remember that Intel's Sapphire Rapids-SP CPUs with a 350W PL1 limit already have an MTP (Maximum Turbo Power) rated at 420W which is equivalent to the RTX 4090 graphics card. The Maximum BIOS limit was 764 and those chips not only ran at lower clock speeds but also didn't feature any overclocking support. Considering that the W-3400 and W-2400 SKUs are mostly entirely unlocked and run at higher clocks, the higher power is also to be expected.

Finally, it is said that the single-core performance of Intel's Xeon Workstation Sapphire Rapids chips is on par with the top 13th Gen SKUs so it looks like those Golden Cove cores are clocking really well & one should expect them to if they are operating at over 500W power. For now, we know that Intel has plans to officially unveil the lineup on the 15th of February followed by a launch in March. Reviews are expected by the end of this month so we will definitely have more information at hand before the chips hit retail.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5000 vs Intel Sapphire Rapids-X HEDT CPUs:

CPU Family	Intel Sapphire Rapids-WS	AMD Threadripper Pro 5000
Process Node	10nm ESF	7nm
Core Architecture	Golden Cove	Zen 3
Platform	W790	TRX80/WRX80
Socket	LGA 4677	LGA 4096
Max Cores / Threads	56/112	64/128
Max Cache (L3)	105 MB	224 MB
Memory Support	DDR5-4800 (8-Channel)	DDR4-3200 (8-Channel)
Max PCIe Lanes	112 PCIe Gen 5.0	128 PCIe Gen 4.0
TDP	Up To 350W	Up To 280W
Launch	Q1 2023	Q1 2022

The post Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPUs Rumored To Hit Over 900W In Cinebench R23 Benchmark by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.