The W790 Chipset Supporting HEDT Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation CPUs Has Been Confirmed

The Intel W790 platform for Intel’s HEDT CPUs has just been revealed.

The “Intel® 600 Series Chipset Family Platform Controller Hub (PCH)” document features a new PCH planned by Intel named as W790. This platform seems to be the next iteration from the previous W680 platform supporting Alder Lake SKUs from Intel.

In Q-Specs, the W790 platform has SRL02 and is available with B1 stepping, similar to all current gen 600 series chipsets. The document features no information regarding the supported CPUs.

The W790 chipset came up last year featuring support for the Sapphire Rapid HEDT CPUs which are known as Sapphire Rapids-X. These CPUs act as successors to the Ice Lake-X/ Cascade Lake-X CPUs from Intel.

Nomenclature wise , Intel now changed the name of its -X series processors to W series indicating that these CPUs will not be for enthusiasts but for workstations. Following the footsteps of AMD, this step from Intel may mark the end of the high performance -X series processors.

The W790 chipset based motherboards were supposedly going to launch with Raptor Lake, just an year after Alder Lake. However, Intel faced delays which could have a major impact on the Sapphire Rapids-X series.

Only one known motherboard features the W790 platform, namely the ASUS Pro WS W790E-SAGE which was listed by HWiNFO. This series has been designed for workstation desktops, however, we have not seen an update since the C621 chipset which supported the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable SKUs from Intel. The new W790 will support DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5.0 and also Intel Sapphire Rapids-X CPUs.