Intel to Disclose PC Roadmap Next Week

helper800 said:

The consumer chips with 30+ threads aren't enough? If you need lanes, then I guess you gotta shell out for Ryzen pro.

bit_user said:

I read elsewhere that the 34-core Raptor Lake is 100% a workstation chip, as those are all P-cores. No idea why they called it Raptor S, though. I wonder if the Sapphire Rapids monolithic workstation chips are internally called Alder S? They go up to 24 cores.

Nikolay Mihaylov said:

There's more to HEDT than just threads/cores (and efficiency cores do not cut it!). Mostly a 4 channel memory controller which provides double the throughput but also double the capacity. Or, better speeds at he same capacity when you need 4 modules to achieve the required capacity. And ECC would be nice. Probably not from Intel, if history is any indication, but one would hope that being the underdog changes their perspective WRT market segmentation.

Then there's the PCIe connectivity. Since on desktop chips it's not enough, MB manufacturers are forced to guess the actual use case in order to come up with the slot distribution. This has had the effect that high-end MBs have worse distribution because current high-end GPUs (which you are supposed to use on a high-end MB, I guess) occupy up to 4 slots. And the first one is usually taken by the M.2 slot because you are supposed to use oversized CPU coolers which may interfere with the card in the first slot so it's risky to place the the GPU slot at the first position. Just give me four x16 slots (supporting 4x4 bifurcation) at positions 1,3,5,7 and three x4 slots in at least x8 physical slots at positions 2, 4 ,6. If that's not enough, then you clearly need a higher end workstation class machine and those are available. But currently, there's a huge gap between desktops and workstations that was traditionally filled by HEDT.

My first encounter with a HEDT machine was when I had to assemble a machne for a friend in 2018. He had pretty high expectations that were impossible to meet with regular boards because they were full with conditions like, if you use this SATA port, then this M.2 slot is disabled; when you use that M.2 slot, some PCIe slot gets disabled. It was impossible to judge the capabilities of the MB from the ports that you see on the photos. So I picked a 12-core (at that time this was huge!) Threadripper 1920X with a X399 MB. Man, whan a relief! Everything was usable without affecting anything else. Ok, the U.2 port was just an alternative for one of the M.2 slots but there were three of those, all directly connected to the CPU! I was so impressed that I bought the same machine for myself. He is currently rocking 128GB (8x16GB) for ECC DDR4 memory, whereas I am only at 64GB(4x16). I have 7 NVMe SSDs (3 on the MB slots and 4 in an adapter running in a 4x4 bifurcated x16 slot).

I'm simply trying to convey that just because your needs are covered by a regular desktop machine, there aren't people whose needs might require something more, without jumping all the way to the highest end workstations. Those are fine, of course - you can always use a more powerfull machine for lesser workloads. But that may be 2-3 times more expensive than is possible with a real middle ground HEDT platform.