RAMming it Home

Consumer-grade CPUs often only support relatively low amounts of RAM. Usually as a result of both motherboard and CPU limitations. Skylake-W processors support up to a very healthy 512GB of RAM. High-end users might scoff at such a “low” limit, but it’s plenty for most mainstream workstation users. Of course, this does not represent an upgrade as previous Skylake Xeons also offered this figure. Compared to something like an i5 quad-core, it’s massive.

Stay In Your Lane

If you want to build a GPU-centric workstation you don’t necessarily want to fork out for CPU power you’ll never need. Unfortunately most budget-friendly CPUs don’t come with an abundance of PCI Express lanes. Even the high-end Core i9 10-core CPU only has 44 of them.

Skylake -W Xeons have a very healthy 48 PCI lanes at maximum, so you’re unlikely to run into GPU bandwidth issues.

Core Issues

The Skylake-W Xeons offer quite a few core configurations. From quad-core CPUs with no hyper threading to 18-core, 36-thread flagships. All running on just one socket. That’s a lot fo upgrade scope.

VR-Ready

One new feature of the Skylake-W CPUs is a focus on VR creation. The CPU has been optimized in terms of latency and performance to do a better job of letting creators make and test VR. Not everyone will care about this feature, but it’s a notable new direction for Intel.

Socket Suckers

As is Intel’s modu operandi, they released a new socket again for high-end machines. In June 2017 we were introduced to LGA2066. This is the same socket the new high-end Skylake-SP uses. Which means you can buy a Xeon-W now and upgrade the CPU later. That is, until Intel launched yet another socket.

Given it’s 14nm process, full enterprise feature set and wide price and performance range, the Xeon-W looks like a worthy successor to the Xeon-E CPUs that seem to have been around for such a long time. If you were waiting to build a more budget-friendly LGA2066 workstation, now is the time.