And that’s exactly what has happened today. Just a few hours ago, a new Sapphire Rapids HEDT processor codenamed “Fishhawk Falls” was spotted by hardware leaker @momomo_us. This new CPU was listed as “Xeon W5-3433” and was found on SiSoftware’s Sandra benchmark platform.
SKU breakdown
The name instantly tells us that we’re looking at a Xeon workstation CPU, and the details on the SiSoftware website gives us more insight into its specs. According to the listing, the W5-3433 is a 16-core, 32-thread processor. That configuration automatically puts it as a successor to the previous-gen Xeon W-3335 which was part of the Lake-X family. Moreover, we see that the W5-3433 features 45MB of L3 cache alongside 32MB of L2 cache. This is another dead giveaway in terms of identification as it confirms we’re looking at a Sapphire Rapids CPU instead of an Alder Lake-based SKU as those are limited to 2MB of L2 cache only. Lastly, the listing also mentions the frequency of the processor which is only 1.99GHz. Keep in mind that this is most likely an engineering sample so that speed makes sense. That’s about everything we know for this CPU. Intel has kept a tight-lip on Sapphire Rapids and very little is known about the upcoming HEDT platform. Usually, Intel’s HEDT families have two releases, one for mainstream consumers (known as Core-X) and one for professional workstations (known as Xeon W-series). We most recently discovered that Alder Lake-X is being prepared as the consumer HEDT offering for this generation, along with the expected Xeon W-series with higher core counts and more workstation-suited features. The interesting bit is, last year a rumor suggested that Intel was looking into completely abandoning the Core-X naming scheme and start referring to all of its HEDT processor as Xeon SKUs, so perhaps replace the “W” (workstation) with maybe a “D” representing mainstream desktop in part names. Lastly, it’s important to mention that we do have a leaked roadmap for Sapphire Rapids, also from yesteryear, that shows how the next-gen HEDT platform will be launching in the second quarter of 2022. Of course, that most likely won’t materialize given how Q2 of this year is nearly over and the series has been subjected to many delays, as mentioned before. Not only that, but we also learned through this roadmap that Sapphire Rapids will be launching with the new W970 motherboard platform. Furthermore, Sapphire Rapids-SP has been reportedly delayed to the second quarter of next year, according to recent rumors. Therefore, we can deduct that the workstation release will be effected by this and, in turn, delayed even further. Apart from a HEDT release, Intel has also been working on its next generation of mainstream processor, the 13th Gen Core series. Raptor Lake is supposed to arrive by the end of this year, as well. On the other hand, the company is also in the midst of executing its Arc A-Series GPU launch which is arguably Intel’s main priority right now. All in all, the Blue Team has likely never been busier.
