On August 30, 2017, Intel released their new Intel Xeon Processor W Family of one-socket workstation processors (hence the W) based on the Skylake-SP Xeon server processors. These processors are meant as a replacement for the older one-socket Intel Xeon E5-1600 v4 series that had up to eight physical cores. The Xeon-W processors will have between four and eighteen physical cores, support up to 512GB of RAM and have 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
These processors are essentially Xeon versions of the Skylake-X Core i9 HEDT processors with all of the professional features enabled such as extended memory support, vPro, Intel’s AMT, and the standard enterprise Reliability, Serviceability and Availability (RAS) features. They will require a new C422 chipset, and they will not work in existing X299 chipset motherboards.
These processors give you another possible choice for buying or building a powerful, professional level workstation. Value-wise, a system based on one of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors is going to be a much better option for most people. Anandtech is a decent write-up here.
Additional Resources
My new Pluralsight course, SQL Server: Upgrading and Migrating to SQL Server 2016 has just been published. This is my eleventh course for Pluralsight, but the complete list of my courses is here.
Building on this online course is a new three day class, IEUpgrade: Immersion Event on Upgrading SQL Server, taught by myself and Tim Radney. The first round of this course will be taught in Chicago from October 11-13, 2017.
Finally, I will be presenting a half-day session called Migrating to SQL Server 2017 at the PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle, WA from October 31- November 3, 2017. You can use this code: BL150GG to register for the PASS 2017 Summit to get a $150 discount.
Here is a link to the complete series about upgrading SQL Server.