The Intel Xeon Silver 4309Y is a server/workstation processor with 8 cores, launched in April 2021. It is part of the Xeon Silver lineup, using the Ice Lake-SP architecture with Socket 4189. Thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading the core-count is effectively doubled, to 16 threads. To further increase overall system performance, up to two Xeon Silver 4309Y CPUs can link up in a multi-processor (SMP) configuration. Xeon Silver 4309Y has 12 MB of L3 cache and operates at 2.8 GHz by default, but can boost up to 3.6 GHz, depending on the workload. Intel is building the Xeon Silver 4309Y on a 10 nm production process, the transistor count is unknown. The multiplier is locked on Xeon Silver 4309Y, which limits its overclocking capabilities. With a TDP of 105 W, the Xeon Silver 4309Y consumes a good deal of power, so decent cooling is needed. Intel's processor supports DDR4 memory with an eight-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 2667 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. ECC memory is supported, too, which is an important capability for mission-critical systems, to avoid data corruption. For communication with other components in the machine, Xeon Silver 4309Y uses a PCI-Express Gen 4 connection. This processor lacks integrated graphics, you might need a graphics card. Hardware virtualization is available on the Xeon Silver 4309Y, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Additionally, IOMMU virtualization (PCI passthrough) is supported, so that guest virtual machines may directly use host hardware. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, Intel has added support for the newer AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions, too.