Intel Xeon Silver 4416+ 20c/40t 2.0GHz-3.9GHz 165W (PK8071305120201)

Intel Xeon Silver 4416+ Processor Expert Overview

The Intel Xeon Silver 4416+ is a 4th Gen Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processor aimed at mainstream dual-socket servers where a balance of core density, memory bandwidth and platform features is more important than peak core counts. It provides 20 cores and 40 threads on the Intel 7 process, staying within a 165 W TDP envelope while delivering modern instructions and I/O capabilities suitable for current-generation datacenter platforms.

The processor operates at a 2.0 GHz base frequency with turbo frequencies up to 3.9 GHz and is equipped with 37.5 MB of shared L3 cache plus 2 MB of L2 cache per core. This cache layout is well suited to multi-threaded consolidation scenarios, such as virtualized environments and container platforms where many workloads share the same socket. The 20-core / 40-thread configuration offers a straightforward scaling path for mid-range virtualization hosts, application servers and infrastructure nodes.

On the memory side, the Xeon Silver 4416+ supports up to 6 TB of RAM per socket and uses an eight-channel DDR5 controller. Validated server configurations commonly run DDR5 RDIMM up to 4000 MT/s, which provides significantly higher bandwidth and better efficiency than previous DDR4-based platforms. This increased bandwidth is valuable in memory-intensive workloads, including JVM-based application stacks, in-memory caches, message brokers and mixed analytics services handling concurrent requests.

The I/O subsystem exposes 80 PCI Express 5.0 lanes, giving system designers enough headroom for high-speed NVMe storage, modern 100/200G network adapters and accelerator or offload cards without quickly running into PCIe lane limitations. In practice, this capacity is important for roles such as software-defined storage nodes, NVMe-oF targets, virtualized edge servers and other configurations where I/O balance can become a limiting factor before raw compute.

Public SPEC CPU2017 results from major OEMs show that dual-socket systems based on the Xeon Silver 4416+ achieve SPECrate2017_int_base scores in the 370+ range and floating-point base scores in the mid-400s. These figures confirm that the processor delivers solid integer and floating-point throughput for typical enterprise workloads when both sockets are fully populated, and that it occupies a strong “workhorse” position in the 4th Gen Xeon stack rather than targeting niche HPC extremes.

The instruction set support covers AVX2, AVX-512 and AMX extensions, which is relevant for cryptography, compression, media processing and some AI inference frameworks that can exploit vector and matrix operations. This enables mixed-use deployments where the same server handles virtualization, microservices, TLS termination, VPN endpoints and selective inference workloads, provided that capacity planning is done carefully.

Overall, the Intel Xeon Silver 4416+ is well suited for organizations that want current-generation DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, need dual-socket scalability and prefer a predictable, efficient platform over maximum core counts at any price. It is a practical choice for mid-size VMware clusters, Proxmox or KVM-based farms, Kubernetes worker and control-plane nodes, and general-purpose enterprise servers where consistent performance and modern features are key buying criteria.