Intel Xeon Platinum 8558 48c/96t 2.1GHz-4.0GHz 330W (PK8072205512300)

Intel Xeon Platinum 8558 — Balanced High-Core Emerald Rapids CPU for Scalable Enterprise, Cloud & HPC Workloads

The Intel Xeon Platinum 8558 is positioned as one of the most balanced processors in the Emerald Rapids portfolio. With 48 cores and 96 threads, it targets enterprises and research infrastructures that need strong multi-socket performance without jumping into extreme TDP or top-bin pricing. This model is often selected for large virtualization clusters, distributed analytics systems and mixed HPC workloads where predictable throughput and node-to-node consistency are crucial.

Emerald Rapids refines the architectural foundation introduced in Sapphire Rapids by improving cache layout, boosting memory subsystem efficiency and increasing overall determinism under sustained load. These refinements directly benefit the 8558, which shows noticeably smoother performance curves in long-running scientific simulations, complex ETL pipelines and large Kubernetes clusters that operate with tight SLO requirements.

The processor leverages a sizable L3 cache pool paired with 2 MB of L2 cache per core, reducing memory stalls and improving performance in analytics engines, distributed SQL platforms and heavily threaded microservices. This design allows the 8558 to perform strongly in real-time streaming workloads, log processing pipelines, VAR engines and in-memory data platforms where latency spikes degrade cluster-wide performance.

Memory bandwidth is a defining advantage of Emerald Rapids. With eight DDR5 channels supporting up to 5200 MT/s, the 8558 delivers stable throughput for high-intensity scenarios such as weather prediction, Monte Carlo simulation, graph analytics and AI inference frameworks optimized for CPU execution. For organizations migrating from DDR4-based Xeon platforms, the uplift in sustained bandwidth is often one of the most impactful improvements observable in production.

I/O expansion is equally robust: up to 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes per socket enable dense accelerator configurations including GPU clusters, SmartNICs, storage fabrics and FPGA-based processing cards. This flexibility makes the 8558 an attractive choice for cloud service providers and private cloud operators looking to build modular compute nodes that scale across varied workload types.

Compared to other Emerald Rapids SKUs, the 8558 occupies a strategic middle ground. It provides significantly higher throughput than 32-core models while avoiding the elevated power envelope of 56- and 60-core variants. This makes it especially appealing for organizations balancing performance per watt, cooling capacity and total cost of ownership. In multi-socket configurations, its efficiency enables dense compute racks with stable thermal characteristics — something critical for HPC clusters and financial modeling grids where sustained turbo behavior matters.

Typical deployment scenarios where the Xeon Platinum 8558 excels include virtualization clusters for enterprise cloud and VDI, distributed analytics and high-volume ETL pipelines, HPC workloads with moderate-to-high parallelism, data-intensive AI inference and classical ML computations, large in-memory databases and real-time SQL processing, and compute nodes in Slurm or Kubernetes-based HPC frameworks.

By combining strong per-core performance, substantial memory bandwidth, and the architectural maturity of Emerald Rapids, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8558 stands out as a reliable, high-efficiency engine for scalable compute environments. It is particularly well suited for organizations aiming to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining predictable performance across diverse workload categories.