Get Closer to Your Creative Vision with Intel® Xeon® W Processors

Whether you’re a hobbyist or professional, the right tools make all the difference in fully realizing your creative, analytical, or scientific vision. My team has talked with workstation users across dozens of professions, from architects and engineers who create complex 3D models, to scientists who analyze massive data sets, to graphics designers who create entirely new worlds with photorealistic scenes and complex animations. Across the board, they agree that not only is slow hardware a pain and a barrier to project completion, but it also takes you out of your creative flow. Slow hardware limits your ability to multitask and see the impacts of your creative decisions fast, and it can mean longer wait times for simulations, renders, and results.

A powerful workstation keeps pace with your imagination

You don’t have to suffer through slow wait times. The latest Intel® Xeon® W processors bring the elevated performance, efficiency, and multitasking capability you need to minimize disruptions to your creative, analytic, or scientific process. This platform is built to address the pain points that workstation users experience in their day-to-day.

Pain point: Multitasking across dozens of apps

Creators in the fields of 3D animation and visual effects (VFX) and game developers are often jumping back and forth, managing heavy-duty workloads across dozens of apps. For instance, you might start with a rough concept in Adobe Photoshop and PureRef, and then transition into layout and asset creation in Houdini by SideFX and Maya by Autodesk, while switching to Katana by Foundry and Adobe Substance Painter to work on textures and surfaces. You might then composite your vision in Nuke by Foundry while simultaneously working on lighting effects and starting render cycles in Houdini and Katana. On top of all this, you’re probably also using various apps for project management and file management and sharing your work on social media.

Your workstation needs to keep up with running dozens of apps without detracting from system responsiveness. The powerful performance of the Intel® Xeon® W processor lets you see the impact of your decisions in as close to real time as possible. Here’s what 3D creator Fabio Sciedlarczyk says about the processor’s impact on his workflow:

“With these new Intel® Xeon® W processors, I can assign some of the cores to a live render session in Maya while I work on other tasks like creating textures in Substance Painter for instance. That kind of multitasking allows me to see the results of my choices faster, trying more ideas and refining the ones I love in less time.”

Watch Fabio's full testimonial here.

Pain point: Massive data sets and long render times

3D, simulation, and VFX all involve the creation and manipulation of large amounts of data. Manipulating simulations and 3D sequences pulls large chunks of data through system memory, requiring more memory bandwidth at faster speeds to ensure system responsiveness. For example, a single 4K texture file can be 200 MB uncompressed. Numerous factors such as scene complexity, compression, and resolution influence your overall file size.

When building a scene, software like Houdini catalogs different objects, textures, and effects in an index to keep overall file sizes low while you’re working and making creative decisions. However, you won’t see the impact of those decisions until you render the scene. Rendering takes a bulk of time and compute power, depending on how clean or noisy you want the final product to be.

Workstations need to be able to handle gigabytes of data per file and terabytes per project. The Intel® Xeon® W processor has the performance headroom to take on more data and the expansion headroom for larger memory capacities (up to 4 terabytes) and more storage devices (up to 28 high-speed SSDs). Here’s VFX artist Arvid Schneider on how this expansion capability impacts wait times:

“The sheer amount of threads and cores running at the same time … you can now, essentially in real time, move lights and have almost the final product visualized. And there’s the Intel® denoiser as well, which works on the fly too, so you can see a denoised version right away. It’s tremendously faster than on a different workstation.”

Watch Arvid's full testimonial here.

The workstation as an extension of the creator’s imagination

Here’s where we get to the fun part. Starting with the workhorse Intel® Xeon® W-2400 and culminating in the powerhouse Intel® Xeon® W-3400 processor, this platform packs a lot of goodness into a single chip for left- and right-brained creators of all stripes:

• Create with more complexity, more layers: The processor’s high number of cores and threads helps maintain system responsiveness even for the most-demanding tasks. Bigger cache helps improve performance by storing frequently accessed data closer to the processor. This means you can keep everything running smoothly while stacking even more layers, textures, and effects and while running more background apps and processes.
• Plug in more GPUs, more peripherals: A high number of expansion lanes supports more double- and triple-slot graphics cards into a single tower and drives better performance for 3D rendering and video editing. Thunderbolt™ 4 lets you connect multiple 4K monitors, docks, and external drives for your preferred workspace configuration.
• Run more efficiently for longer stretches: The Intel® Xeon® W processor is designed to run for long periods of time without overheating, to support long rendering cycles or sprints of creativity. Oftentimes heat determines the ceiling for your performance, so a more-efficient processor allows you to run at high clock cycles for longer periods.
• Connect and collaborate with ease: Integrated Intel® Wi-Fi 6E enables powerful wireless connections for backing up files to the cloud or network-attached storage (NAS). And if you work with a team of creators, your IT department will appreciate the integrated support for Intel vPro®, which offers remote manageability and robust security features enabled at the chip level in your workstation.

Software optimization makes the most of your hardware

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also address software considerations. Powerful hardware is just one half of the equation, and optimized software is the other half. That’s why Intel also works with software vendors such as Adobe, Autodesk, SideFX, Foundry, and countless others to ensure smooth performance on Intel® architecture. There are too many to list here, but chances are that your preferred creation software suite has benefited from Intel working behind the scenes with that software’s dev team.

In addition to these collaborations, you also benefit from support for the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit that’s baked into the chip. There are several essential libraries, tools, and deployment guides for everything from ray tracing to denoising. These help you weave more-immersive and -photorealistic effects into your creations.

Workstations powered by Intel® Xeon® W processors help eliminate barriers to your creativity

More-powerful hardware means fewer limits on complexity. Creators can add more explosions, more liquids, more photorealism. Scientists, analysts, and researchers can dig deeper into larger pools of data. Engineers can work more efficiently on simulations and designs with more details and components. You can do all of this—and trust your hardware to support your vision.

This is the right time to start thinking about your hardware because new products from OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo are hitting the market now. Find a powerful Intel-based workstation that’s right for you.  

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