Intel Xeon Silver 4116 socket: LGA 3647

What the Xeon Silver 4116 is

The Xeon Silver 4116 is a twelve core, twenty four thread server processor from Skylake-SP. It launched in July 2017 with a 2.1 GHz base and up to 3.0 GHz Turbo at 85 W. Twelve cores with Hyper-Threading cover mainstream dual socket racks where threads balance cost and throughput.

Sixteen point five megabytes of L3 cache feed twelve cores. The 2.1 GHz base keeps 85 W across many cores, while 3.0 GHz Turbo lifts lightly threaded management tasks. Two UPI links connect dual sockets.

No integrated graphics ship. Six channel DDR4-2400 ECC up to 768 GB per socket suits virtual hosts. Forty eight PCIe lanes per CPU handle NICs and NVMe.

Intel listed the 4116 at $1002 at launch as a volume Silver SKU. Clouds chose it for scale out virtualization where 85 W per socket trims power. Locked multiplier keeps fleets uniform.

Socket and motherboard compatibility

The 4116 fits LGA 3647 on C620 Purley boards. Makers list Skylake-SP SKUs by board revision, so check the support page before used purchases. It scales to two sockets per node.

Boards expose six memory channels and 48 PCIe lanes per socket for mainstream racks. Vendor heatsinks for 85 W with front to back airflow suit 1U nodes. The Socket vs chipset: what decides whether a CPU works guide covers server matching.

The Xeon Bronze 3106 on the same socket trims cores and threads where cost matters. The Gold 6154 adds cores and clocks for heavier creation.

Memory, PCIe and cooling

DDR4-2400 ECC in six channels up to 768 GB per socket is the target. Population order follows board manuals with primary slots first. ECC protects virtual tenants.

PCIe 3.0 with 48 lanes per CPU serves networking and storage. Dual socket nodes share I/O across CPUs. UPI links carry socket to socket traffic.

Cooling follows narrow or square ILM vendor lists for 85 W. Chassis airflow matters more than heatsink brand.

Upgrade paths

On LGA 3647 the step is Gold 6154 for cores or Platinum 8180 for maximum threads, reusing board and DDR4. Many Purley boards accept Cascade Lake-SP with a BIOS update.

Past LGA 3647 the path is newer Xeon Scalable with faster DDR4 or DDR5. Memory and NIC additions usually come before CPU swaps.