Intel Xeon Gold 5418Y 24c/48t 2.0GHz-3.8GHz 185W (PK8071305120301)

Intel Xeon Gold 5418Y: Dual-Socket DDR5 Processor for Scalable Virtualization and Analytics Workloads

The Intel Xeon Gold 5418Y is a dual-socket optimized processor from the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” family, built for high-bandwidth DDR5 platforms, multi-node virtualization clusters and data-intensive enterprise workloads. With 24 cores, 48 threads, a 2.0 GHz base frequency and turbo speeds up to 3.8 GHz, the 5418Y offers a well-balanced compute profile for environments that require both parallel throughput and strong memory performance.

Unlike the single-socket–oriented 5412U, the Xeon Gold 5418Y is designed for 2-socket systems, enabling servers with up to 48 cores and 96 threads combined on one motherboard. This makes the processor a strong fit for infrastructures where horizontal and vertical scaling are both important, including virtualization clusters (VMware, Proxmox, RHV), multi-tenant cloud platforms, large Kubernetes or OpenShift worker nodes, enterprise analytics engines and distributed SQL/NoSQL databases.

The Xeon Gold 5418Y supports eight channels of DDR5-4400 memory, providing significantly higher bandwidth than DDR4-based Ice Lake systems. This increased throughput is particularly beneficial for Apache Spark and Flink workloads, in-memory computing engines, real-time data pipelines, column-oriented databases such as ClickHouse and high-concurrency microservice environments. DDR5 helps reduce memory contention and improves stability under mixed and bursty cloud-native workloads.

Equipped with 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, the 5418Y delivers next-generation I/O performance by doubling bandwidth per lane compared to PCIe 4.0. Dual-socket servers based on this CPU can integrate dense NVMe Gen4/Gen5 storage arrays, high-speed 100/200/400 GbE NICs, SmartNICs and DPUs for network and security offloading, FPGA accelerators and GPU inference modules or edge AI accelerators. This level of I/O capacity is especially valuable in storage-heavy, network-intensive or accelerator-rich configurations.

With 24 cores and 48 threads, the Intel Xeon Gold 5418Y targets organizations that need strong multi-threaded performance without stepping into the higher TDP and cost profile of large Platinum SKUs. It performs well in mid-to-large virtualization hosts, analytics engines such as Presto, Trino and Spark SQL, distributed caching stacks using Redis, Aerospike or Hazelcast, search platforms built on Elasticsearch or OpenSearch and messaging systems such as Apache Kafka or Pulsar. The 3.8 GHz turbo frequency supports low-latency execution for API gateways, orchestration services and coordination layers embedded in these architectures.

As part of Sapphire Rapids, the 5418Y benefits from an enhanced security and virtualization feature set, including hardware mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, MDS and L1TF, Total Memory Encryption (TME), Mode-Based Execution Control (MBEC), improved VM isolation and scheduler behavior and optional Intel SGX support depending on the server platform. These capabilities make it suitable for multi-tenant, zero-trust and compliance-sensitive workloads.

With a 185 W TDP, the Xeon Gold 5418Y is intended for robust dual-socket servers such as Dell PowerEdge R760, HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen11, Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 and Supermicro X13 platforms. These chassis are optimized for DDR5 memory subsystems and the bandwidth demands of PCIe 5.0 devices, ensuring stable performance under sustained high-load conditions.

In real-world deployments, the Intel Xeon Gold 5418Y is commonly chosen for dual-socket cloud compute nodes, enterprise virtualization clusters, analytics platforms with constant parallel load, distributed database and search clusters, high-network-bandwidth storage systems, large-scale microservice backends and regional datacenter nodes where high per-socket memory and I/O bandwidth are critical. Its combination of 24 cores, DDR5 throughput, PCIe 5.0 support and dual-socket scalability makes it a powerful building block for modern cloud-native and enterprise infrastructures.