After nearly three years, Intel is returning to the desktop workstation with the hotly-anticipated ( and long-rumored ) Granite Rapid-WS series. Now known as Xeon 600, the new series covers all of Intel’s bases for desktop workstations. With previous-gen Sapphire Rapids-WS, Intel split its offerings between two different lineups — Xeon W-2500 and Xeon W-3500 — but all Granite Rapids workstation chips will live under the same Xeon 600 branding.
Granite Rapids has been deployed in the data center for about a year and a half, and in that time, AMD introduced its Zen 5-based Threadripper 9000 chips , leaving an open spot in the market for Intel to release its next-gen workstation CPUs. In total, Intel has 11 SKUs for Xeon 600, five of which will show up as boxed models for individual retail sale. Intel hasn’t provided a firm release date for the CPUs yet, but it says new W890 motherboards and systems from brands like Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro, and Puget will be available starting in late March.
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Compared to refreshed Sapphire Rapids-WS parts, Intel broadly claims Xeon 600 delivers up to 9% better single-threaded performance and up to 61% higher multi-threaded performance. The latter metric is explained by much higher core counts on Xeon 600 chips. The previous-gen flagship, the Xeon w9-3595X, topped out at 60 cores. Now, Intel has two SKUs that go above that mark, with the Xeon 698X sporting 86 cores and the Xeon 696X coming in at 64 cores.
Like its data center counterpart, Xeon 600 chips use the Redwood Cove microarchitecture that first debuted in Intel’s Meteor Lake mobile chips. Here, the core counts are massively scaled up, however, and keeping with Intel’s new split of Xeons with a heterogeneous architecture, Xeon 600 CPUs exclusively use P-cores with Hyper-Threading.
Intel Xeon 600 ‘Granite Rapids-WS’ specs
Swipe to scroll horizontally Row 0 - Cell 0 698X 696X 678X 676X 674X 658X 656 654 638 636 634 Cores / Threads 86 / 172 64 / 128 48 /96 32 / 64 28 / 56 24 / 48 20 / 40 18 / 36 16 / 32 12 / 24 12 / 24 Frequency (Base / Boost) 2 GHz / 4.8 GHz 2.4 GHz / 4.8 GHz 2.4 GHz / 4.9 GHz 2.8 GHz / 4.9 GHz 3 GHz / 4.9 GHz 3 GHz / 4.9 GHz 2.9 GHz / 4.8 GHz 3.1 GHz / 4.8 GHz 3.2 GHz / 4.8 GHz 3.5 GHz / 4.7 GHz 2.7 GHz / 4.6 GHz All-core Turbo 3 GHz 3.5 GHz 3.8 GHz 4.3 GHz 4.3 GHz 4.3 GHz 4.5 GHz 4.5 GHz 4.5 GHz 4.5 GHz 3.9 GHz L3 Cache 336MB 336MB 192MB 144MB 144MB 144MB 72MB 72MB 72MB 48MB 48MB Base TDP 350W 350W 300W 275W 270W 250W 210W 200W 180W 170W 150W Memory channels 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 4 4 4 MRDIMM Support 8000 MT/s 8000 MT/s 8000 MT/s 8000 MT/s 8000 MT/s — — — — — — PCIe 5.0 Lanes 128 128 128 128 128 128 128 128 80 80 80 Boxed — Yes Yes Yes — Yes — Yes — — — Suggested Price $7699 $5599 $3749 $2499 $2199 $1699 $1399 $1199 $899 $639 $499
Above, you can see the full list of Xeon 600 SKUs, which range from $499 for the 12-core Xeon 634 up to $7,699 for the flagship Xeon 698X. Note the five SKUs that will be available individually in boxed retail units. Intel says all SKUs will be available in tray, but the boxed lineup tops out at the 64-core Xeon 696X. The split largely mirrors AMD and how it’s treated Threadripper 9000 chips, with the main range topping out at 64 cores, but the Threadripper Pro 9000 WX range climbing up to 96 cores.
Short of the bottom three SKUs, there are some platform features that are consistent across the Xeon 600 range. X-series SKUs are unlocked for overclocking, and they all support octa-channel memory with officially sanctioned speeds up to 6,400 MT/s. You also get 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, CXL 2.0 support, and Intel’s AMX accelerator in each CPU core, which now supports FP16 instructions. The chips also support up to 4TB of memory, doubling what’s available on AMD’s Threadripper 9000 WX range and quadrupling support compared to the base Threadripper 9000 range. Granted, even a 1TB kit of DDR5-6400 RDIMMs will run you about $28,000 right now.
(Image credit: Intel)
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