The Intel Xeon Silver 3508U is a server/workstation processor with 8 cores, launched in December 2023, at an MSRP of $415. It is part of the Xeon Bronze lineup, using the Sapphire Rapids-SP architecture with Socket 4677. Thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading the core-count is effectively doubled, to 16 threads. Xeon Silver 3508U has 22.5 MB of L3 cache and operates at 2.1 GHz by default, but can boost up to 2.2 GHz, depending on the workload. Intel is building the Xeon Silver 3508U on a 10 nm production process, the transistor count is unknown. The multiplier is locked on Xeon Silver 3508U, which limits its overclocking capabilities.
With a TDP of 125 W, the Xeon Silver 3508U consumes a lot of power, so good cooling is definitely needed. Intel’s processor supports DDR5 memory with an eight-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 4400 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. ECC memory is supported, too, which is an important capability for mission-critical systems, to avoid data corruption. For communication with other components in the system, Xeon Silver 3508U uses a PCI-Express Gen 5 connection. This processor lacks integrated graphics, you might need a graphics card.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Xeon Silver 3508U, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Additionally, IOMMU virtualization (PCI passthrough) is supported, so that guest virtual machines may directly use host hardware. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, Intel has added support for the newer AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions, too.