The Intel Xeon Platinum 9242 is a server/workstation processor with 48 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 96 threads. To further increase overall system performance, up to eight Xeon Platinum 9242 CPUs can work together in a multi-processor (SMP) configuration. Xeon Platinum 9242 has 71.5 MB of L3 cache and operates at 2.3 GHz by default, but can boost up to 3.8 GHz, depending on the workload. Intel is making the Xeon Platinum 9242 on a 14 nm production node using 8,000 million transistors. The multiplier is locked on Xeon Platinum 9242, which limits its overclocking potential.
With a TDP of 350 W, the Xeon Platinum 9242 is extremely power hungry, which means you need top-notch cooling. Intel's processor supports DDR4 memory. ECC memory is supported, too, which is an important capability for mission-critical systems, to avoid data corruption. This processor lacks integrated graphics, you might need a graphics card.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Xeon Platinum 9242, 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.