Intel launches Xeon 600 workstation processors

Intel has launched the Xeon 600 series Granite Rapids-WS processors for workstations and HEDTs. These processors mainly target Artificial Intelligence development, where you take advantage of Intel AMX (FP16) accelerators, and a fully-fledged AVX-512 instruction set, along with a large PCIe I/O. The key talking point with this processor is its Compute complex.

The processor comes with up to 86 ‘Redwood Cove’ P-cores. These are the same P-cores powering Core Ultra ‘Meteor Lake’ processors, and feature Hyper-Threading, besides a full-fat AVX-512 pipeline. The top-speed SKU hence comes with an 86-core/172-thread configuration, with a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.80 GHz. Intel claims that the core-configuration offers a 61% multithreaded performance gain over the previous generation.

The Intel Xeon 600 series is built in the LGA4710 package, and supports Intel W890 chipset. It is configured with an 8-channel DDR5 memory interface (16 sub-channels), supporting up to 4 TB of ECC DDR5 memory, with speeds of up to DDR5-8000 being supported. The processor’s PCIe root complex puts out 128 PCI-Express Gen 5 lanes. Intel is also offering CPU overclocking features with these processors.

There are as many as 11 processor models, with core-counts ranging from the top 86-core/172-thread down to 12-core/24-thread, all models come with 8-channel ECC DDR5 memory and PCI-Express 5.0 x128. All processor models support Intel vPro remote manageability feature-set.