Intel confirms that Sapphire Rapids will use the Golden Cove microarchitecture

Intel’s new generation of Xeon series processors, Sapphire Rapids, will debut in the second half of 2021. In the relevant roadmap published last year, it was not confirmed which architecture Sapphire Rapids will use. Intel has not disclosed more information in the past few months, and only recently confirmed it through other means.

According to VideoCardz, Intel’s Linux engineer Andi Kleen recently submitted a new kernel patch, which confirms that Sapphire Rapids will use the Golden Cove architecture core instead of the Willow Cove architecture core currently used by Tiger Lake. This means that Sapphire Rapids will have the same architecture core in the upcoming Alder Lake. It is understood that if you continue to use the Willow Cove architecture core, some features and functions will not be implemented in Sapphire Rapids.

In fact, some users have passed some information before and noticed that Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids have many identical CPU instructions. It is speculated that the two products will be very similar in architecture. This time the relevant information has finally been confirmed.

Sapphire Rapids will be manufactured using the 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process and will be configured with up to 56 cores, a lot more than the 40 cores of the current third-generation Xeon Scalable processor Ice Lake-SP, and it also supports new features such as PCIe Gen5, CXL 1.1, and DDR5/HBM2 memory.

It is also worth noting that although Sapphire Rapids is a processor in the server field, Intel is likely to develop a new HEDT platform based on Sapphire Rapids. It may be the previously leaked Emerald Rapids processor and Fishhawk Falls platform used to replace the Galcier Falls platform of the Cascade Lake-X processor. In the field of high-end consumer-level desktop processors, Intel has not updated for a long time, and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper series currently dominates this market.