Intel Xeon Gold 6338N 32c/64t 2.2GHz-3.5GHz 185W (CD8068904722302)

Intel Xeon Gold 6338N — 32-Core Ice Lake Processor for High-Density Enterprise Workloads

The Intel Xeon Gold 6338N is a 32-core Ice Lake server processor designed for organizations that require substantial parallel throughput, robust memory bandwidth and predictable performance under sustained multi-tenant workloads. As part of Intel’s N-series lineup, this model targets networking-centric and data-intensive environments where node efficiency, cluster-wide balance and consistent latency are as important as raw computational power.

With 32 cores and 64 threads, the 6338N offers a strong compute profile suitable for both high-density virtualization and distributed compute frameworks. Its 2.2 GHz base frequency ensures reliable long-duration performance, while turbo frequencies up to 3.5 GHz deliver additional responsiveness during peak load periods or mixed workload transitions. This makes it well-suited for environments where low-latency services coexist with heavy batch analytics.

Built on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP architecture, the processor benefits from wider execution units, improved vector operations (including AVX-512 with per-core flexibility), and enhanced cryptographic acceleration. These improvements translate directly into stronger performance for HPC-lite tasks, encryption/decryption pipelines, large data scanning operations and machine learning inference workloads.

A defining advantage of the 6338N is its 8-channel DDR4 memory controller, which provides the bandwidth needed for applications dependent on frequent data exchange, including:

• distributed SQL and NoSQL database systems
• real-time analytics engines
• large-scale caching layers for microservice ecosystems
• data lake indexing and transformation pipelines
• memory-driven ML preprocessing and feature extraction

Support for up to 6 TB of system memory makes the processor suitable for enterprise-scale datasets, multi-tenant VM hosting, and in-memory OLAP systems that require predictable throughput even during peak hours.

The inclusion of PCIe 4.0 enables faster interconnect speeds for NVMe arrays, modern accelerators (AI, FPGA, SmartNICs), and high-speed networking modules. This significantly enhances cluster responsiveness in cloud-native infrastructure and in hybrid HPC workloads where GPU-accelerated tasks interact heavily with CPU-resident data structures.

The Xeon Gold 6338N has a 165W TDP, allowing consistent stability for workloads such as distributed compute frameworks, multi-node orchestration systems, encryption-heavy services and enterprise virtualization clusters. It also benefits from Intel’s improved power management mechanisms, enabling more predictable scaling across heterogeneous workload mixes.

This processor is especially effective in:

• high-density Kubernetes clusters
• large-scale virtualization deployments using VMware, Proxmox or Hyper-V
• distributed analytics platforms (Spark, Hadoop, Flink)
• service mesh and microservice architectures handling millions of requests
• real-time data transformation pipelines and ETL orchestration
• enterprise-grade AI inference using optimized CPU kernels

Overall, the Intel Xeon Gold 6338N provides an excellent balance of compute power, memory scalability and I/O capability. It is a strong choice for modern enterprise workloads and remains a proven performer in cloud, edge, and data center environments seeking scalable, efficient processing with long lifecycle stability.