Years after losing ground in its game, Intel seems to be picking up with its new Sapphire Rapids series. In an overclocking test conducted by Team OGS – Intel’s Xeon W9-3495X recorded an unbelievable 5.4GHz speed – standing against the rival Threadripper Pro 5995WX from AMD. This gives the company a lot of confidence to regroup its faith in the server CPU market.
Reclaiming the Server CPU Market
In the last four years, AMD has successfully overthrown Intel from its own game of chip making, with Ryzen, Epyc and Threadripper series in all the segments where Intel used to lead. As the red team continues to excel, the blue team is preparing to reclaim its lost glory with a new chip series – the Sapphire Rapids.
Aimed at high-end servers and workstations, the Sapphire Rapids series is Intel’s first multi-chip module (MCM) CPU using the native “tile” architecture. Each tile here has up to 15 cores, with one each them disabled in the latest Xeon W9-3495X chip.
Well, Intel here is playing the catchup game with AMD – with the former’s Sapphire Rapids series being mostly equivalent to the latter’s Epyc Naples, which came out in 2017. And they’re hopefully showing the results, with a new test revealing how powerful the Xeon W9-3495X is.
Earlier, one of the extreme overclockers Safedisk team, used liquid nitrogen and other techniques to overclock Xeon W9-3495X, resulting in the chip recording 5.2GHz speeds. Team OGS and other overclocking experts have pushed the same chip to 5.4GHz speeds in Cinebench testing – setting a new world record.
Though it’s the same frequency as Threadripper Pro 5995WX’s – tested by Safedisk last month – it’s still remarkable from Intel’s point of view. This shows the potentiality of Intel’s Sapphire Rapids series, giving the company scope to explore further.
This record could only be short-lived, as AMD is coming with a new set of Epyc and Threadripper CPUs made on Zen 4 architecture, potentially more powerful than their Intel counterparts. The upcoming AMD CPUs will have up to 96 cores and are better efficient than Intel’s Sapphire Rapids series.
