When it comes to halo products, the Intel Xeon W-3275 certainly fits the description. This is Intel’s fastest single-socket Intel Xeon W-3200 series processor. It is also its fastest publicly available 28-core LGA3647 Xeon SKU in its Cascade Lake generation. For the workstation market, Intel increases maximum turbo speeds, removes multi-socket capabilities, and adds in the ability to handle 16 more PCIe 3.0 lanes for a total of 64. If you want to talk about a halo product, this is it, more so than the LGA2066 Xeon W-2200 series that was just launched. The Xeon W-3275 sits above and in this article, we are going to show benchmarks and why it is an important processor in the market.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon W-3275: 28 cores / 56 threads with a 2.5GHz base clock and 4.4GHz turbo boost. Speeds of up to 4.6GHz can be had with Turbo Boost 3.0. There is 38.5MB of onboard cache. The CPU features a 205W TDP. These are $4,449 list price parts. You can find the full Intel Ark page here.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for an Intel Xeon W-3275:

These properties look similar to an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 as they are very similar chips. The Intel Xeon W-3200 series also includes support for new extensions such as Intel DL Boost (avx512_vnni above.)

We should mention here that we are using the standard SKU that supports, at most, 1TB of memory per socket. There is also an “M” SKU, the Xeon W-3275M that supports up to 2TB of memory per socket. Neither support Intel Optane DCPMM, and that is a complete miss. The potential of unlocking new applications with high core count and clock speeds with the Xeon W along with more PCIe lanes and Optane DCPMM support would have had certain high-performance segments salivating.

Test Configuration

For this review, we are using the same Supermicro X11SPA-T that we just reviewed.

Motherboard : Supermicro X11SPA-T motherboard

: Supermicro X11SPA-T motherboard CPU : Intel Xeon W-3275 2.5GHz (28 core/56 thread)

: Intel Xeon W-3275 2.5GHz (28 core/56 thread) Cooling : Dynatron 4U CPU Heat Sink

: Dynatron 4U CPU Heat Sink RAM : 6x 32GB DDR4-2933R SDRAM (25-21-21-47 CR1) Low Profile

: 6x 32GB DDR4-2933R SDRAM (25-21-21-47 CR1) Low Profile SSD : Samsung PM961 1TB

: Samsung PM961 1TB OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Using commodity DDR4-2933 32GB RDIMMs, one gets a nice speed bump from the previous generation DDR4-2666. We have 192GB of memory on this platform using only 6 of the twelve DIMM slots.

The Supermicro X11SPA-T we are using has an enormous amount of I/O and is designed to realistically be used in a workstation chassis, or a 4U rackmount workstation managed like a server from the data center. The motherboard provides a lot of flexibility here.

Next, let us move on to benchmarks.