Intel SR3GF Xeon Gold 5118 12-Core Server CPU (Renewed)

The Intel Xeon Gold 5118 is a 12-core, 24-thread Skylake-SP processor on Intel's LGA 3647 server socket. At 2.3GHz base and 3.2GHz single-core turbo with 16.5MB L3 cache, the clock figures undersell what this processor is engineered to do: saturate six-channel DDR4 ECC memory with parallel compute threads. Six DDR4 memory channels per socket means bandwidth scaling that no consumer platform can match for memory-bound workloads, regardless of clock speed. In a dual-socket configuration, two 5118s provide 24 cores, 48 threads, and 12 active memory channels — the standard building block for enterprise virtualization nodes, CFD compute clusters, and in-memory database servers of this generation.

The renewed status is the pricing mechanism that makes this processor accessible for homelab builds, academic research clusters, and cost-conscious professional workstations. A properly inspected renewed 5118 performs identically to new — the Skylake-SP architecture is mature with stable driver and firmware support across ESXi, Linux, and Windows Server. Platform prerequisites are non-trivial: an LGA 3647 server board with appropriate power delivery and ECC RDIMM population adds significantly to total system cost. The value case is specifically for workloads that need ECC memory, dual-socket scalability, or sustained parallel throughput — this chip was built for exactly those scenarios and delivers on them reliably.