Official Specifications for the Intel W790 Chipset Leak Out

Hardware leaker, HXL, once again managed to obtain an internal spec sheet from Intel. This slide highlights the specifications of Intel’s upcoming W790 chipset. For the unaware, this specific chipset is for the HEDT consumer market supporting the Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 series of CPUs. Read more about these CPUs here. 

The W790 Chipset

The W790 chipset, as stated above is for team blue’s upcoming Sapphire-Rapids-based Xeon CPUs. The C741 chipset, on the other hand, is for the server-oriented Sapphire Rapids lineup (4th Generation of Xeon Scalable CPUs).

Starting off, the W790 platform comprises entirely of PCIe Gen 5.0 CPU lanes. The Xeon W-3400 series is leaked to be equipped with 112 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, with the W-2400 series dropping this count to 64 lanes. The W790 chipset itself provides 16 PCIe Gen 4.0 and 12 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes alongside a maximum of 8 SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports.

Our previous coverage highlighted the memory channel support offered by these CPUs. The new chart from Intel officially confirms the previous leak. The Xeon W-3400 lineup will provide 8-channel DDR5 memory with 2 DIMMs per channel. Similarly, the Xeon W-2400 lineup will offer slightly cutdown 4-channel DDR5 memory with 2 DIMMs per channel.

Lineup & Release Date

As per a leaked schedule, team blue is set to showcase the SPR-WS series on February 12, 2023. These CPUs will be divided into various categories like other Intel Core CPUs, which are as follows:

W9 Series

Starting off with the W9 family, we see the Xeon W9-3495X and the W9-3475X with 56 and 36 cores respectively. Both of these SKUs are based on an MCM design. Similarly, both of these CPUs are overclockable as highlighted by the ‘X’ in their name.

W7 Series

The W7 series consists of 5 different SKUs, namely the Xeon W7-3465X, Xeon W7-3455, Xeon W7-3445, Xeon W7-2495X, and the Xeon W7-2475X. The highest core count offering in this range appears to be 28 cores going as low as 20 cores.

W5 Series

Serving the purpose of a budget-friendly HEDT offering, the mid-ranged W5 family has the most SKUs. The core counts in the W5 lineup range from 16 cores down to 8 cores. 

W3 Series

The ‘low-end’ SP-WS family codenamed W3 consists of 3 SKUs. The slowest among the pack is the Xeon W3-2423 packed with 6 cores and 12 threads.