Intel has been lagging behind AMD in the core race since the debut of AMD's Ryzen CPUs in 2017. They sported more cores in just about every sector of the market and with the introduction of AMD's Threadripper chips, particularly in the second-generation, even Intel's 18-core 9980XE looked somewhat pedestrian in heavily multithreaded workloads. The 28-Core Xeon W-3175X was a step towards parity, delivering comparable performance in multicore work and greater single threaded power than even the most capable Threadripper. And now there's the Xeon Platinum 9200 to consider.
The 9200 is a 56-core monster based on Intel's upcoming Cascade Lake architecture. It's 14nm, but 14nm+++ so it's not the same beast as the original Skylake design of its lineage. It will run at a base clock of 2.6GHz, turboing to 3.8GHz. It's not clear how many cores can hit that frequency simultaneously, but it could be a large number, since the TDP of this chip is a whopping 400w. That's more than two a half-times the requirements of the Core i9-9980XE.
Other features of the 9200 include support for 12-channel DDR4 memory, and a massive 77MB of cache.
That chip will sit at the top of the new Xeon stack, with 48 core and 32-core versions with varied clock speeds set to join it. These chips will be firmly targeting datacenters, although we wouldn't be surprised to see one or two end up in overclockers' machines just to see what they can do with it.
No release date or pricing information has yet been revealed, but expect Intel to release more details in the coming months as we approach the release of AMD's third-generation Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs.
