Intel Xeon Platinum 8352Y 32c/64t 2.2GHz-3.4GHz 205W (CD8068904572401)

Intel Xeon Platinum 8352Y — balanced Ice Lake CPU for memory-intensive dual-socket servers

The Intel Xeon Platinum 8352Y belongs to the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable “Ice Lake-SP” family and is positioned as a balanced part for dual-socket systems where you need both solid core density and strong single-thread responsiveness. It offers 32 cores and 64 threads, a 2.2 GHz base frequency with turbo up to 3.4 GHz, 48 MB of shared L3 cache and a 205 W TDP, built on the 10 nm Ice Lake process.

Due to the combination of core count and clock speeds, the 8352Y fits well into mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments: moderately loaded virtualization clusters, mid-sized databases, analytics engines and application servers that must keep latency predictable under varying load. Compared to very high core-count SKUs, it sacrifices some thread capacity in exchange for higher all-core frequencies and more comfortable thermal headroom, which is often easier to exploit in real world deployments than the theoretical maximum throughput of “top bin” models.

A key strength of this processor is the memory subsystem. Xeon Platinum 8352Y exposes 8 DDR4 channels per socket and supports DDR4-3200 ECC memory with a maximum capacity of up to 6 TB per CPU, including Intel Optane persistent memory configurations in appropriate platforms. This configuration provides high aggregate bandwidth and very large addressable memory, which is crucial for in-memory databases, columnar analytics engines, caching tiers and large JVMs where memory pressure usually becomes the main bottleneck. Moving to 3200 MT/s versus some earlier 2nd Gen parts improves effective throughput for bandwidth-sensitive code such as in-memory OLAP, distributed caching and key-value stores.

On the I/O side, the 8352Y offers 64 lanes of PCI Express 4.0 per socket and is designed for 2-socket scalability. This combination allows building dense nodes with a mix of NVMe storage, high-speed NICs (25/50/100G and above) and accelerators without saturating PCIe bandwidth. For operators designing storage or virtualized network functions (NFV) platforms, PCIe 4.0 is especially useful for large NVMe pools and smartNICs, where link bandwidth directly impacts tail latencies and consolidation ratios.

From an instruction set perspective, the 8352Y implements the full Ice Lake server feature set, including AVX-512, VNNI / DL Boost, Intel AES-NI, TSX, SGX (depending on SKU and platform), as well as virtualization extensions VT-x, VT-d and EPT. This gives architects flexibility: the same node can serve as a hypervisor host, run vectorized analytics workloads, or execute inference models that leverage AVX-512 and DL Boost without requiring dedicated accelerators in all scenarios. For teams modernizing legacy AVX2-based code, Ice Lake’s wider vector units and cache subsystem can provide meaningful uplift with limited refactoring effort.

Another notable capability is Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) support. For this SKU, multiple performance configurations are available at the firmware level, allowing operators to trade active core count against higher base frequencies and different power envelopes. This is practical in environments where licensing or per-core subscription models dominate cost structure: you can pin the processor into a profile with fewer active cores but higher clocks to optimize both performance per licensed core and energy consumption.

In practical deployments, Xeon Platinum 8352Y is often used as a workhorse CPU for dual-socket general-purpose nodes in enterprise private clouds, as a foundation for memory-heavy analytics and search clusters that need predictable latency under mixed query loads, and as a balanced compute engine for large microservice platforms, where a combination of per-core performance, memory bandwidth and network I/O all matter.

When compared to denser SKUs such as Platinum 8352V, the 8352Y focuses less on absolute core count and more on sustained frequency with 32 cores, DDR4-3200 support and a 205 W TDP. This profile tends to be attractive for operators who prefer stable thermal behavior and strong per-core metrics, especially in racks with constrained cooling or in clusters where software licensing costs scale with core count.

Overall, Intel Xeon Platinum 8352Y is a solid choice for 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable platforms where the primary requirements are large memory footprint, balanced per-core performance, and enough I/O lanes to connect storage and networking without compromise. It is not the most extreme SKU in the Ice Lake lineup, but it hits a practical sweet spot for many real data center configurations, making it a sensible “default” CPU for new dual-socket designs that should handle a wide spectrum of workloads over several refresh cycles.