Intel Fall Desktop Launch Event

Intel Fall Desktop Launch Event: Introduction

On Monday, October 8, 2018, Intel hosted an event in New York City to unveil a slew of new desktop processors. Way up above the city on the 68th floor of 3 World Trade Center; it was a fitting setting to take the CPU market to new heights.

Intel started the presentation by highlighting some of the key releases this year "built specifically for creators and gamers." This included the 8th Gen Intel Core i9 mobile processors in April, the Creator PC in June, and the 8th Gen Intel Core mobile processors for the mainstream (Core i3, i5, and i7) in August. But now the focus was all on the desktop market.

Intel Xeon W-3175X

Intel kicked off the announcements with the whopping 28-core Intel Xeon W-3175X processor. Built for the most highly threaded and compute intensive applications, it can tackle those intense workloads with up to 4.3GHz single-core turbo frequency, 56 threads, 38.5MB Intel Smart Cache, 6-channel DDR4 memory support for up to 512GB at 2666MHz, and of course, the ECC and standard RAS support you'd expect. But what you may not expect is that the W-3175X will be unlocked. Yes, if you want to push this beast even further, Intel won't be stopping you!

Intel then invited David Hearn, Rigging Supervisor on Tangent Animation's Next Gen, to the stage. Next Gen is an animated feature film released on Netflix last month. Hearn spoke about how the studio used a Xeon processor to handle the rendering in Blender. The studio actually had to do four render passes (mono, stereo, mono in Mandarin, and stereo in Mandarin), so you can imagine how much processing power went into that.

The Xeon W-3175X is expected to ship this December.