Intel announces new Xeon W-3300 processors with significant performance upgrades

Intel has announced its latest generation of Xeon W-3300 processors. These include five new processors - W-3375, W-3365, W-3345, W-3335, and W-3323. The new processors are built to offer exceptional performance for workstations. They are also known as "Ice Lake" as part of the codename given by Intel for 10th generation Core mobile and third-generation Xeon processors.

The new lineup is based on a brand new architecture on the 10nm process node, with more support for I/O and memory. The Ice Lake Xeon Workstation series of processors will use the LGA 4189 socket platform with support for up to 270W TDP CPU, 64 Gen 4.0 PCIe Lanes, and even 8 channel DDR4-3200 memory that can be up to 4TB.

The processors are significant upgrades over the previous generation of Xeon processors. According to Intel, the W-3300 processors deliver the following benefits:

• Up to 2.5 times maximum memory capacity support1 and up to 31% memory bandwidth increase.
• Up to 45% faster multi-threaded performance in Cinema 4D workloads.
• Up to 26% faster on preview rendering workloads in AutoDesk Maya.
• Up to 20% faster editing and encoding performance in Adobe Premiere Pro workloads.
• Up to 27% faster on final 3D rendering workloads in AutoDesk Maya.

Other technologies that are being used in the Ice Lake family of processors that the firm lists include:

• Up to 4.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost 2.0.
• Intel Deep Learning Boost to power machine learning inferencing workloads.
• Up to 4TB DDR4-3200 8-channel memory support.
• Intel AVX-512 instruction support.
• Error-correcting code (ECC) memory support.
• Built-in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) technologies.
• Intel Optane SSD P5800X support.

With the significant upgrades over previous-gen Xeon processors, Intel is positioning its offering against AMD's new Threadripper Pro lineup with its 32-core chips and similar memory specs. The company also detailed its architecture roadmap recently. Intel's Xeon W-3300 lineup is expected to hit the market in 2022.