Intel refreshes workstation lineup with Xeon W-2200 series

While the Intel Cascade Lake-X CPUs were announced a bit earlier, the Xeon W-2200 workstation CPUs have jut been announced. They are pretty much the same parts, but the Xeon W parts offer support for ECC memory, Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) as well as Intel’s vPro platform.

Basically these features enable the Xeon W-2200 processors to deliver better reliability when tackling sensitive workloads, while Intel vPro lets an IT team better manage your system remotely. Coming from the last generation Xeon W-2100 processors, Intel also added Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 on the higher end SKUs to deliver higher clocks when running lightly threaded applications.

Intel Xeon W-2200 Series Specs

It’s worth noting that these Xeon W-2200 processors all support quad-channel DDR4-2933 memory, and up to 1TB total RAM. That means eight sticks of 128GB DDR4 ECC DIMMs. Fully kitted out, your RAM should cost more than your CPU at this point.

In addition to the upgraded performance at lightly threaded tasks, the new Intel Xeon W-2200 also come with DL Boost, which Intel claims to be up to 2.2x faster at image recognition. Meanwhile for more “regular” workstation workloads like 4K editing, 3D rendering and game compiling, they are promising up to 11% higher performance versus the W-2100 series. Pitting it against a 3-year old desktop we see up to 2.1x faster performance. Considering that no professional outfit will change their hardware every year, the latter comparison actually paints a much more realistic image.

Like the Intel Cascade Lake-X processors, the new Xeon W-2200 processors will hit markets in November.

Pokdepinion: Time to prepare those proposal decks to get your bosses to upgrade your workstations!