Intel W790 Sapphire Rapids workstation motherboard exposed, used with LGA4677 interface CPU

CTOnews.com November 26, the Canadian retailer Atic.ca has launched an unreleased X13SWA-TF motherboard of the Intel W790 chipset. It is designed for Intel Xeon workstations with LGA4677 interface, that is, Sapphire Rapids series processors.

The Supermicro X13SWA-TF motherboard, which is in an E-ATX form factor and is suitable for workstations, desktops and servers, is priced at 1290 Canadian dollars (6907.40 yuan), but does not mention the time to market.

The motherboard has six PCIe 4.0x16 slots, two 10GbE interfaces (Intel X550), and an intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) for remote management, with little mention of support for PCIe 5.0 or M.2 slots.

CTOnews.com learned that Intel confirmed the W790 motherboard earlier this year, but never disclosed which processors it would support. Considering that the motherboard uses a LGA4677 socket, this also means that it should support Intel Xeon processors codenamed Sapphire Rapids.

Given its positioning, the motherboard should work with some models (less than 60 cores but higher main frequency Sapphire Rapids processors) or Intel 34-core Raptor Lake-S processors discovered earlier this year.

At the same time, considering that both Sapphire Rapids and Raptor Lake-S have high-performance cores based on Golden Cove micro-architecture and have something in common, some foreign media believe that Intel's "34-core Raptor Lake" processors will belong to the Xeon series, although Intel has never publicly discussed this point.