Intel Xeon 600 'Granite Rapids-WS' workstation CPU details: Xeon 698X has 86C/172T for $7699

Intel has announced its new Xeon 600 "Granite Rapids" workstation CPUs, offering up to 86 cores and 172 threads of CPU power, 8000 MT/s memory support, 128 PCIe Gen5 lanes, 350W TDP with OC support, and costs up to $7699.

13

This is the company's answer to AMD and its fantastic Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series CPUs, with the new Intel Xeon 600 series CPUs fabbed on its in-house Intel 3 process node using Redwood Cove P-Cores. Xeon 600 workstation processors are aimed at content creators, data scientists, professionals, AI workloads, and other workstation segments. These include AI Dev, Media, Energy & Geo-Sciences, Life Sciences & Healthcare, and Financial Services.

Intel says its new Xeon 600 "Granite Rapids" workstation CPUs are designed to "Unleash Heavy-Duty Compute" with higher performance efficiency in an expandable platform, and with vPro technologies, the new Granite Rapids CPUs are ready for modern AI developers.

• Read more: Intel W890 platform leak: Granite Rapids CPU will compete against Threadripper 9000

The company has 11 different SKUs of Xeon 600 chips with 6 "Expert" tier or "X" variants, and 5 "mainstream" SKUs, including the Xeon 698X, 696X, 678X, 676X, 674X, 658X, 656, 654, 638, 636, and 634. They each have the same package but feature different sets of dies, with the Xeon 698X and Xeon 696C featuring XCC dies, sporting two compute tiles or chiplets per package.

13

The 48-core through to the 24-core Xeon 600 processors are based on the HCC die, with the 20-core down to the 12-core Granite Rapids CPUs based on the LCC dies. Intel is offering up to 86 cores with Xeon 600, short of the huge 128 P-Core limit because of physical constraints, like the size of the package.

Xeon 600 is made for the workstation and HEDT market, not for servers, with Intel saying that the UCC-class chips break in small form factors for desktop-like configurations. To put it simply, Xeon 600 is too massive for a regular chassis inside of a station CPU.

Intel's flagship Xeon 698X processor has 86 cores and 172 threads, 336MB of L3 cache, a base CPU clock of 2.0GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.8GHz, an all-core boost clock of 3.0GHz, a base TDP of 350W and a MTP (Maximum Turbo Power) of 450W. It's even fully overclockable, sports 128 PCIe Gen5 lanes, support for 8-channel DDR5 memory at up to 6400 MT/s (DDR5 UDIMM) and up to 8000 MT/s using MRDIMM modules.