Intel Sapphire Rapids to introduce PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support in 2021

Huawei's future is in jeopardy due to the US trade ban but the company recently showed off a server product roadmap that contains several leaks about upcoming Intel products. The most interesting thing here is perhaps the inclusion of "Sapphire Rapids". This unannounced Xeon processor architecture will be the first server chip from Intel to feature PCI Express 5.0 support and it will also introduce eight-channel DDR5 support.

With an unannounced CPU core-count, the "Sapphire Rapids-SP" processor will introduce DDR5 memory support to the data-center, which aims to double bandwidth and memory capacity over the DDR4 generation. The processor features an 8-channel (512-bit wide) DDR5 memory interface. The second major I/O introduction is PCI-Express gen 5.0, which not only doubles bandwidth over gen 4.0 to 32 Gbps per lane, but also comes with a constellation of data-center-relevant features that Intel is pushing out in advance as part of the CXL Interconnect. CXL and PCIe gen 5 are practically identical.

Sapphire Rapids-SP is expected to be out in 2021 and will be followed up by Granite Rapids-SP in 2022, which will build upon Sapphire Rapids-SP.



Via: TPU