[The Exiled]

Intel launches mainstream Cascade Lake Xeon W workstation processors

Today, Intel is launching its new Xeon W processors. Intended for the workstation and professional creators market, the Xeon W-2200 series processors are based on the Cascade Lake microarchitecture. The new series is a direct successor to the Skylake W which was introduced in August 2017, missing the usual yearly release cycle cadance. The W-2200 processors are workstations processors and come with the usual bells and whistles for this market from Intel such as vPRO, RAS, VROC, and ECC support. At the platform level, up to 72 PCIe Gen 3 lanes are offered – x48 from the processor itself and x24 more carved from the PCH I/Os. Two new features that were added in this round is DL Boost which is the AVX512-VNNI extension which was added to Cascade Lake for the acceleration of inference workloads and Turbo Boost Max 3.0 (TBMT). Interestingly, no Optane DC persistent memory support is available for those processors.

Intel announces price cut for 9th generation F and KF processors

Intel states that this price change is in effect as of today. As this price change effects its OEM bulk pricing (prices given for 1000 units), it may take some time to filter down to the end-user based on stock levels at retailers and OEMs, for those that don’t already have a price difference. Nearly every 9th Generation Core processor for the desktop has a corresponding graphics-free option: the Core i9-9900K has its Core i9-9900KF, the Core i5-9500 has a Core i5-9500F. The difference between these two parts is just a matter of disabled graphics, which means the user can’t take advantage of Intel’s QuickSync or a display, however most of these processors end up in systems with discrete graphics cards anyway. At the time of launch, Intel priced them identically to the parts that did have graphics, but ultimately retail outlets were selling the K and KF processors at a small discount. Intel’s announcement today makes that price difference official.

Izvor: WikiChip Fuse i AnandTech