The Intel Xeon W-1300 series is the clear successor to the Xeon W-1200 series that we have looked at for some time. While the Xeon W-1200 series was a clear step forward, the Xeon W-1300 series is mostly a step forward, but in some senses is a step backward as well. This new Xeon W line is designed as the workstation counterpart to the 11th Gen Intel Core (Rocket Lake-S) that we looked at as part of our Intel Core i9-11900K review. The Xeon W-1300 series maintains a tradition spanning over a decade of rebranding desktop parts with ECC support as “Xeon” for some markets.
Intel Xeon W-1300 SKU List and Value Analysis
The Intel Xeon W-1300 series has seven SKUs just like the previous-generation Intel Xeon W-1200 series. Beyond the data below, one must remember that there are a few new features we get with this generation including Intel Xe graphics with the UHD Graphics P750 as well as PCIe Gen4 support despite these still being 14nm parts.
In terms of pricing, replacing the generational “2” with “3” in the product name leaves pricing at the same level for the new SKU versus the older SKU.
Perhaps the biggest change is with the Xeon W-1390(P/T) models. The core counts of these parts is down to 8 cores from 10 in the W-1290(P/T) models. As a result, we see the first generational decrease in core counts with a 20% drop here.
With similar pricing levels and lower core counts, we see that our price per core metrics look a lot less constrained into a similar band. Here is the Xeon W-1200 series for reference.
Here is the Xeon W-1300 series. As one can see, the higher-end 8-core parts now have a large premium attached. As with the Xeon E3-1200 series buyers will remember, this pricing model extracts a large premium for the higher clock speeds without offering more cores.
As a result, when we look at the cores and threads times the clock speed and divide that by price, we get a much worse picture for the Xeon W-1390(P/T) than we did with the previous generation.
Unlike in the previous generation, we have a fairly easy way to show here why it is likely a better value buying the Xeon W-1370(P) versus the Xeon W-1390(P) since one gets the same number of cores, relatively similar clock speeds, and without the large price premium.
Final Words
Intel did a “stealth launch” for this one making the SKUs available on ARK without other fanfare as we had with the previous generation. The new integrated graphics and PCIe Gen4 are a big benefit to the new parts as we saw in our Rocket Lake-S coverage. At the same time, the prospect of digressing in terms of core counts with the new parts is certainly disappointing. In a current environment of chip shortages to some users the 10-core previous generation parts may be attractive.
I had really hoped that those jubilee clips were actually tape drive heads like from the old StorageTek machines that ought to be in museums everywhere to teach kids how incredible were the feats of multi disciplinary engineering we excelled in to get us here…
Are these going to be available at retail any time soon? The extra PCIE x4 lanes off the CPU is what must interests me with them over the old ones.
Look at the core count graph, without AMD Ryzen, Intel would very likely give users 4 core max. in 2021
I’m happy with my Threadripper 24C/48T which will continue to be used for many years after these new Xeons have landed into the dustbins of history which will happen as soon as INTEL cuts the umbilical cord from 14nm. Rocket Lake for workstation.
I think this is really unbalanced review due to single fact: completely ignoring different core implementation in W-13xx and in previous generation. The core should provide +15-20% IPC increase and with high frequency this is great CPU generation for single-threaded workloads. Anyway, due to IPC change the article price/perf/core comparison is quite off.
But anyway, thanks for the article whole W-13xx would otherwise gone unnoticed. I’ve also noticed that Supermicro created a board for this with W580 chipset. Good!
Where can I buy W-1390P? Ordering Code: CM8070804497213
KarelG – not a review. We have been using this methodology for years since I used to do these pieces. Also, you will notice base clocks fell here. We covered this in the linked Rocket Lake-S reviews.
Despite the reduced core count, these W-1300 series will likely be attractive to people running lower end home servers that may need more horsepower than Xeon D, need QuickSync support for BlueIris (video surveillance software), or even Plex transcoding duties w/o the extra power consumption of an AIB. P750 is suppose to be a decent upgrade from the P630 on the W-1200 series. Not to mention the PCIx gen 4 support.
The Xeon-W13xx is sold by a few dealers, and we bought a 1370P about a month ago. Boards with the W580 chipset have not shown up at any dealers in our reach. We bought the Gigabyte W480M Vision W, which is specified to support these CPUs. The CPU did not work on that board as delivered, so we used a Celeron to do the necessary upgrade steps, but alas, now the board works neither with the Xeon-W1370P, nor with the Celeron.
Where the 8-core W-1300 outperformed the W1200 10-core counterparts – I really don’t see any reason to add 10-core models here as Intel has them and way above in their higher end solutions LGA3647; LGA4189 and probably coming up later with consumer-enthusiast lightweight workstation parts for LGA1700 sockets I suppose..
But check this out
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/socketType.html#i47