Intel W680 Block Diagram Leaked, Hinting Towards A Major Change To Alder Lake Xeon CPUs

Intel W680 Block Diagram leak suggests a big change coming to Alder Lake Xeon CPUs.

The leaked blocked diagram may reveal an interesting transition in how Intel will go about positioning and marketing its next round of server CPUs. Some details have also been revealed about the fascinating new features. It was posted to Twitter by @momomo_us, and it was observed that it eschews any mention of a Xeon-W series. The leaked chipset diagram was labeled as, “12th Gen Core for WS.”

small w680 diagram

The picture reads, ’12th Gen Core for WS’ instead of ‘Xeon W-1400 Series’. So Intel is making a ‘Core i9-12900W’. It seems they’re really pivoting the ‘Xeon W’ brand to mean ‘High End Workstation’ instead of ‘Processor with ECC Memory Support!’

The W680 chipset seems very similar to the Z690 for Alder Lake. We’re looking at support for both DDR5 (up to 4800 MT/s) and DDR4 (up to 3,200 MT/s) ECC memory, 16 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes, four PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes, and several display connectivity options.

The diagram also shows some Alder Lake goodies like Deep Learning Boost (VNNI) and Gaussian Network Accelerator (GNA), these are very useful for certain workstation workloads.

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The diagram does not mention whether Intel will enable AVX-512 on its mainstream Alder Lake Xeon processors. This feature is not active on Intel’s consumer Alder Lake chips, though MSI added the option to at least one of its motherboards (MEG Z690) for those who really want it.

In any case, it looks like a launch is expected soon. The block diagram is leaked just a few weeks after a retailer posted listings for a couple of Supermicro W680 motherboards.

Via HotHardware