Intel Xeon Gold 6448H 32c/64t 2.4GHz-4.1GHz 250W (PK8071305121300)

Intel Xeon Gold 6448H: High-Core DDR5 Processor for Demanding Virtualization, Analytics and Cloud Workloads

The Intel Xeon Gold 6448H is a high-end model within the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” family, designed for dual-socket servers that require strong parallel performance, high memory bandwidth and sustained efficiency under complex enterprise workloads. With 32 cores, 64 threads, a 2.4 GHz base frequency, turbo speeds up to 4.1 GHz and 60 MB of L3 cache, the 6448H delivers significantly more compute density than lower Gold-series SKUs while maintaining a solid balance between throughput and per-core responsiveness.

With its 32-core configuration, the Xeon Gold 6448H targets organizations running workloads that scale efficiently with parallel execution, including large virtualization clusters with high VM density, distributed SQL and NoSQL databases, analytics engines such as Apache Spark, Flink, Presto and Trino, distributed caching systems and microservice-heavy cloud environments. Event-streaming platforms like Apache Kafka and Pulsar also benefit from the additional core headroom this processor provides compared to 24-core models.

The Xeon Gold 6448H is designed for 2-socket platforms, enabling configurations with up to 64 cores and 128 threads in a single server. Dual-socket deployments deliver higher aggregate memory bandwidth, increased I/O capacity and more predictable scaling in large clusters. This makes the 6448H particularly suitable for enterprise virtualization, cloud infrastructure, container platforms and distributed systems where node-level performance directly affects overall cluster throughput.

DDR5 support is a key advantage of the 6448H. The processor supports eight memory channels with speeds up to 4400–4800 MT/s, providing significantly higher bandwidth than DDR4-based generations. This is especially important for in-memory data platforms, real-time analytics workloads, large JVM-based microservices, database engines with heavy buffer/cache usage and scientific or HPC workloads that require rapid data movement. In mixed enterprise workloads, DDR5 helps reduce memory bottlenecks and maintains high sustained throughput even when many threads are active.

Equipped with 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, the Xeon Gold 6448H is well-suited for I/O-intensive deployments. Dual-socket servers based on this CPU can host dense NVMe Gen4/Gen5 SSD clusters, high-speed 100/200/400 GbE networking adapters, RDMA-capable fabrics, SmartNICs and DPUs for network and security offloading, FPGA accelerators, GPU inference modules and high-performance storage controllers. PCIe 5.0 doubles the per-lane bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0, which is critical for next-generation storage and network infrastructures.

Despite its high core count, the 6448H offers turbo frequencies up to 4.1 GHz, which is beneficial for latency-sensitive portions of the stack. API gateways, service meshes, orchestration and coordination services, distributed database control-plane logic and real-time monitoring pipelines all benefit from the combination of many cores and strong single-thread performance. This makes the processor versatile across both data-plane and control-plane workloads.

As part of the Sapphire Rapids family, the Intel Xeon Gold 6448H includes enhanced security and virtualization features, such as hardware mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, MDS and L1TF, Total Memory Encryption (TME), Mode-Based Execution Control (MBEC), improved VM isolation and scheduling behavior and optional Intel SGX on compatible platforms. These capabilities are important for multi-tenant, zero-trust and compliance-driven environments.

In real-world deployments, the Xeon Gold 6448H is commonly chosen for dual-socket virtualization servers with high vCPU density, cloud compute clusters handling heavy multi-tenant loads, large SQL/NoSQL database clusters, message streaming backbones, analytical and ETL pipelines, storage systems with massive I/O requirements and HPC workloads that benefit from a large number of CPU cores. Its blend of 32 cores, DDR5 bandwidth, PCIe 5.0 connectivity and high turbo frequency makes it one of the most capable and future-ready Xeon Gold processors for next-generation enterprise and cloud infrastructures.