Intel Xeon E-2400 Series Brings Raptor Lake to Servers

To many, this may come as a surprise, but Intel’s Raptor Lake parts have not been launched for servers yet. Today is the day that we finally get the Intel Xeon E-2400 series, just after the recent 14th Gen Intel Core Raptor Lake Refresh Processors were released. At Intel, there is a long history of taking what are essentially desktop parts, adding ECC support, and validating them for servers.

Intel Xeon E-2400 Series Brings Raptor Lake to Servers

Here is the quick update on the new Intel Xeon E-2400 series processors. Some of the big features are support for DDR5-4800 memory and PCIe Gen5. The PCH also gets a big upgrade.

For those wondering, Intel usually has a different set of firmware for its Xeon E line of processors. So the workflow is usually desktop parts launch first, then workstation, then server. This follows in that tradition.

Final Words

This is a really interesting announcement. VMware currently does not support hybrid cores, a key feature of the Raptor Lake architecture. That is a big challenge for Intel’s P+E core designs as VMware has historically been very popular. We will see what the recent Broadcom – VMware Acquisition changes in that space. Having up to eight Raptor Lake cores is good, but Intel has competition. AMD has been heavily promoting its Zen 4 server CPUs in the space. Those have features like we recently showed in our ASRock Rack AM5D4ID-2T BCM Review where they can utilize not just 16x P-core chips, but also the X3D parts with AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology. Perhaps the reason that these parts are buried in today’s announcement is that they are in a very competitive segment.

We have already been testing a number of these servers and you should expect to see reviews of them in the next two weeks.