The Intel Xeon Platinum 9221 is a server/workstation processor with 32 cores, launched in April 2019. It is part of the Xeon Platinum lineup, using the Cascade Lake-AP architecture with BGA 5903. Thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading the core-count is effectively doubled, to 64 threads. To further increase overall system performance, up to eight Xeon Platinum 9221 CPUs can work together in a multi-processor (SMP) configuration. Xeon Platinum 9221 has 71.5 MB of L3 cache and operates at 2.1 GHz by default, but can boost up to 3.7 GHz, depending on the workload. Intel is making the Xeon Platinum 9221 on a 14 nm production node using 8,000 million transistors. The multiplier is locked on Xeon Platinum 9221, which limits its overclocking potential.
With a TDP of 250 W, the Xeon Platinum 9221 is extremely power hungry, which means you need top-notch cooling. Intel's processor supports DDR4 memory with a quad-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 2933 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 machine, Xeon Platinum 9221 uses a PCI-Express Gen 3 connection. This processor lacks integrated graphics, you might need a graphics card.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Xeon Platinum 9221, 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) can run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, Intel is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512.