Enlarge / Intel’s Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs. (credit: Intel)
Intel’s next-generation Xeon CPUs based on the new Sapphire Rapids architecture have been delayed more than once, but Intel is finally gearing up to begin selling them to PC companies and end users. According to an announcement-about-an-announcement tweet from Intel, a “data center launch event” on January 10 will include Sapphire Rapids processors, and the chips have currently “met product release qualifications and the company is starting to ramp-up deployment.”
Also called “Xeon Scalable” or 4th-generation Xeon, Sapphire Rapids CPUs were originally slated for release in late 2021, but by mid-2021, that had become the first quarter of 2022, then “later in the year than originally forecasted,” and now early 2023. We still don’t know when the chips will actually begin shipping, only that we’ll be getting more information in January. These kinds of delays are relatively common for Intel, which also struggled to release its Arc-dedicated desktop GPUs on time and has suffered repeated manufacturing setbacks in the last decade.
In an interview with The Verge last month, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger talked about the Sapphire Rapids delays, tacitly blaming them on previous leadership and indicating that future products wouldn’t have the same bumpy rollout.
