OpenMetal XL v3 vs XL v4: What Changed

Q: What is the difference between the OpenMetal XL v3 and XL v4?

The XL v4 replaces the Intel Xeon Gold 6430 (Sapphire Rapids) with the Gold 6530 (Emerald Rapids), raising max turbo from 3.4 GHz to 4.0 GHz, expanding L3 cache from roughly 60MB to 160MB per socket, and adding Intel TDX confidential computing support that the XL v3 did not have.

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Both generations run dual-socket configurations with 64 physical cores and 128 threads per server, and both ship with 1TB of DDR5 RAM. The memory speed increases from 4400 MT/s on the XL v3 to 4800 MT/s on the XL v4 — a 9% bandwidth increase that benefits in-memory database workloads and large VM fleets. The XL v4 also moves to the Intel 7 process node, which improves performance-per-watt over the v3’s manufacturing process.

Storage configuration changed between generations. The XL v3 included six 6.4TB NVMe data drives (38.4TB raw) on a single 960GB boot drive. The XL v4 reduces the data drive count to four Micron 7500 MAX units (25.6TB raw) while adding a second 960GB boot drive in RAID 1 — a meaningful reliability improvement for the OS path. The Micron 7500 MAX provides higher per-drive performance than the XL v3’s drive configuration, with 1.1M random read IOPS per drive and a sub-1ms 6-nines QoS guarantee.

The most significant architectural change is Intel TDX availability. Sapphire Rapids (Gold 6430) does not support TDX; Emerald Rapids (Gold 6530) does. Because the XL v4 ships with all 16 DIMM slots populated at 1TB, TDX is active out of the box — no RAM upgrade and no configuration change required. Teams evaluating the XL v3 for confidential computing, regulated data processing, or multi-tenant SaaS isolation with hardware-enforced boundaries will find that only the XL v4 satisfies that requirement.