First pictures leak of Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs, but 2022 release date could make it a tough sell in the face of Zen 4 EPYC Genoa

Chinese tipster @YuuKi_AnS recently outed what appears to be the first real pictures of Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon server chips. Both images are flanked by anime characters, but from what we can make out, it appears that this chip features a relatively large die. Accompanying details indicate that the Sapphire Rapids chip will work on the upcoming LGA 4677 platform and that it will support next-generation DDR5 RAM, with support for the PCI-e 5.0 standard. 

Sapphire Rapids isn't expected to hit the market until 2022-2023, and questions remain about Intel's ability to build server chips at volume on the 10nm process. AMD has been steadily increasingly its share of the server market thanks to the Zen 2-based EPYC Rome lineup, delivering comparable IPC to Cascade Lake Xeon parts, while costing less and consuming less power. The upcoming Zen 3-based EPYC Milan processors will slated to bring improved power efficiency and higher IPC to the table. With AMD working on Zen 4, it remains to be seen how Sapphire Lake will stack up to EPYC Genoa when it comes out.