An entry in Geekbench reveals the first technical details of Intel's upcoming high-end CPUs Sapphire Rapids, which operate internally under the name Family 6 Model 143. What stands out is a much larger L2 cache, apparently 2 Mbytes per core should be available. The L3 cache is also expanded.
True to the motto “a lot helps a lot”, Intel seems to be revising the fast caches again. While the server variants have always offered more than the desktop or notebook processors, 2 MByte L2 cache per core is a new record for Intel's CPUs in recent history. Ice Lake-SP brings it to 1.25 MByte L2 cache per core, the predecessors Cascade Lake-SP up to Skylake-SP were on the way with 1 MByte. The last cache level, the L3 cache, also grows with the tasks: 75 MB are read, a 40-core at Intel now has 60 MB L3 cache. Intel does not touch the L1 cache for instructions and data in terms of quantity.
Larger cache and later the cooperation with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on the same package should be able to provide a significantly higher performance in some scenarios. The Intel platform Vulcan City with the version number 0020 indicates a very early evaluation solution, which is why the clock rates should not be given so much attention. 1.5 GHz base clock is the normal case for early samples, the 4.7 GHz turbo clock read out in the database sounds more like a read error in this phase, because they are too good to be true, which is also supported by the poor benchmark results. Here, Alder Lake samples always produced far too high values at the maximum clock rate. The memory is also not read correctly, Sapphire Rapids is the first x86 server platform to support DDR5 – the first consumer modules are already on the market.
Intel still has it anyway Time, around a year should pass before the start. Intel plans to begin initial production in the first quarter of 2022 and then ramp it up in the second quarter of 2022. This should probably indicate a start in the middle or at the end of the second quarter, with availability from the summer. According to rumors, the variants with HBM will appear on the package around six months later. A solution for desktop operation is also expected in the second half of 2022, the then five-year-old X299 platform should finally have a real successor with a 790 solution and suitable CPUs.