Intel W790 Workstation Class Motherboard Listed, ‘Fishhawk Falls’ Arriving Next Year

Next year, Intel will reinstate the Xeon series giving some serious competition to AMD’s Threadripper lineup. The platform we’re looking at will be based on ‘Sapphire Rapids‘ and will go by the name of ‘Fishhawk Falls‘. Preliminary leaks show that these CPUs will go as high as 56 Cores / 112 Threads. This is much lower than AMD’s upcoming Threadripper 7000 CPUs boasting a fierce 96 core / 192 thread configuration.

Fishhawk Falls Inbound

A Canadian retailer has the W790 motherboard up for purchase at ATIC.ca. Readers should note that this motherboard features the LGA-4677 socket which is supported by none other than Sapphire Rapids. Essentially, Fishhawk Falls is the Xeon variant for Alder Lake (Alder Lake-X). The 4th generation Scalable Xeon CPUs for servers ‘Sapphire Rapids’ will be announced formally by Intel on the 10th of Janaury.

Currently, the price tag of 1290 Canadian Dollars clearly identifies the W790 as a server-class motherboard. This board features 6x PCIe Gen 4 slots, 2x 10Gbit LAN ports with the E-ATX form factor. It is clear that Intel is aiming big with Fishhawk Falls. 

Moore’s Law Is Dead gave us a lot of insight regarding these CPUs a while back. Allegedly, Fishhawk Falls based on Sapphire Rapids will arrive sometime in 2023, possibly during the first quarter. Alongside that, a refresh based on Emerald Rapids may launch during the same year but in the second half. 

One more thing is that Fishhawk Falls will arrive in 2 categories;

• Mainstream Xeon
• Xeon Extreme

The mainstream Xeons as highlighted by MLID will go up to 24 cores (minimum of 16 cores). They are expected to be based on the LGA 4677 socket. Whereas, the higher-end Xeon Extremes will directly compete against AMD’s best. 

Release Date

Although we do not have a clear launch/release date, expect Fishhawk Falls to launch sometime in Q1 2023. Any later and Intel will slip behind schedule and you probably know what happens next. AMD has to step up and introduce a non-PRO Threadripper lineup because Intel is diversifying its offerings into various segments. This could severely impact AMD’s market position because content creators can simply opt for a mainstream Xeon CPU without breaking the bank.