Intel unveils Xeon W-3300 Ice Lake CPUs for workstations

Intel has unveiled the latest family of Xeon workstation CPUs, comprising five 10nm chips, built on the Ice Lake architecture with up to 38 cores and support for up to 4TB memory.

The W-3300 family is designed for advanced professional applications with heavily threaded and input/output-intensive workloads, Intel claims, with applications stretching across AI, architecture, engineering, construction, and media.

The five new chips, W-3375, W-3365, W-3345, W-3335, and W-3323, replace the W-3200 series and comprise a new processor core architecture to deliver better performance, expanded capabilities, and enterprise-grade security. These are all available immediately through Intel's system integration partners.

The most advanced, the Intel Xeon W-3375 CPU, features up to 38 cores and 76 threads. It also supports frequencies of up to 4GHz, 64 processor PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes, and up to 4TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory.

It builds on the W-3200 series, with the Cascade Lake chips fitted with up to 28 cores and 56 threads while supporting up to 2TB of six-channel DDR4 memory.

Overall, this processor family supports up to 2.5 times more maximum memory and up to 31% memory bandwidth increase against the previous generation, and a variety of performance boosts as measured in the context of media workloads.

For instance, it boasts up to 45% faster multi-threaded performance in Cinema 4D workloads and up to 20% faster editing and encoding performance in Adobe Premiere Pro workloads. This is alongside up to 26% faster on preview rendering workloads in AutoDesk Maya, as well as 27% faster performance on final 3D rendering workloads.

Pricing of these CPUs vary from $949 (roughly £680) for the weakest model, the Intel Xeon W-3323 processor, to $4,499 (roughly £3,220) for the most advanced, the Intel Xeon W-3375 CPU.

Intel launched the latest generation of its Xeon Scalable CPUs in April 2021, also built on the Ice Lake architecture, but targeted at data centres as opposed to workstations. While these 10nm chips are largely similar to the W-330 family, they can go up to a maximum of 40 cores.

AMD, similarly, launched its latest generation of Ryzen Threadripper Pro series of CPUs earlier this month, taking aim at Intel. The four processors included the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX, the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX, the 16-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX, and the 12-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3945WX.