Intel Xeon Gold 5318H 18c/36t 2.5GHz-3.8GHz 150W (CD8070604481600)

Intel Xeon Gold 5318H — Multi-Socket Cooper Lake CPU for Enterprise Virtualization and Memory-Intensive Workloads

The Intel Xeon Gold 5318H is an 18-core Cooper Lake processor designed specifically for 4-socket and 8-socket enterprise platforms, where memory bandwidth, predictable NUMA scaling and heavy virtualization density are more important than peak per-core frequency. As part of the Cooper Lake family, the 5318H targets organizations building large east-west traffic clusters, legacy-dependent infrastructures, in-memory databases and high-availability backends that rely on consistent multi-socket behavior rather than raw clock speeds.

Unlike Ice Lake Xeons—which focus on PCIe 4.0 and newer memory architecture—Cooper Lake was optimized for high-scale symmetric multiprocessing, with strong UPI interconnect performance and predictable scheduling across four or more sockets. This makes the Xeon Gold 5318H especially suitable for environments where CPU-to-CPU latency is a decisive factor: clustered ERP systems, financial risk calculation engines, large virtualization farms, telecom workloads, and enterprise applications that rely on massive shared-memory pools.

With 18 cores and 36 threads, a 2.5 GHz base clock and up to 3.8 GHz turbo, the processor provides stable throughput for VM consolidation, multi-tenant hosting, and mixed workloads where dozens of medium-load VMs run simultaneously. Cooper Lake’s architecture also retains full AVX-512 support and introduces bfloat16 acceleration, giving the 5318H additional value in scientific applications and AI inference pipelines that depend on vector operations.

A key practical strength of this CPU is its six-channel DDR4 memory controller, supporting up to 1.12 TB per socket. In multi-socket deployments this scales linearly, enabling extremely large memory footprints for SAP HANA installations, high-volume caching layers, and analytics platforms that keep entire datasets in RAM. Even though DDR4 is slower than the later DDR5 generations, its latency characteristics and maturity often benefit legacy enterprise systems tuned for deterministic behaviour.

The platform exposes 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which—while not oriented toward modern GPU-heavy compute—remain fully adequate for enterprise networking, NVMe storage arrays, RAID controllers and FPGA-based acceleration. Many organizations continue to deploy Cooper Lake platforms for one reason: proven long-term stability in mission-critical workloads, where change management is complex and validated hardware matrices matter more than theoretical performance.

In a multi-socket environment, the Xeon Gold 5318H demonstrates strong performance scaling for:

• VMware vSphere and Hyper-V clusters
• Enterprise OLTP/OLAP workloads
• SAP, Oracle and MS SQL deployments
• Telecom and networking control planes
• Distributed in-memory processing
• High-density virtualization platforms

For datacenters that maintain large Cooper Lake infrastructures, the Xeon Gold 5318H is a strategically safe choice: predictable behaviour, excellent multi-socket characteristics, broad compatibility with enterprise software stacks, and a stable power envelope of 150W, easily manageable in dense chassis configurations.