Intel Talks Up 2024 Xeon Sierra Forest & Granite Rapids At Hot Chips

For Hot Chips 2023, Intel has made some new disclosures around Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest.

With Hot Chips 2023 taking place in-person at Stanford this week, Intel has made some brief disclosures concerning their next-gen wares for introduction in 2024. This includes Intel's focused on compute intensive and AI workloads with Xeon Scalable Granite Rapids as well as for high density and scale-out workloads with the E-core-only Sierra Forest processors.

Intel's presentation materials do note that Sierra Forest E-core servers will come in either single or dual socket while Granite Rapids will be available in up to eight socket configurations. It also reiterates previously reported information based on Linux kernel patches that there is support for up to 12 DDR5 memory channels with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest.

Intel also confirms up to 136 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and CXL 2.0 support as well as having up to six UPI links.

Intel also talked up their AI capabilities thanks to Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX).

Intel also talked up the vCPU capacity with Sierra Forest allowing up to 144 cores per socket. However, let's not forget AMD EPYC Bergamo is already shipping with 128-cores / 256-threads per socket today and AmpereOne is also working its way out with up to 192 ARM cores per socket. In any event with Sierra Forest Intel will be better competing now on the core count.

Sierra Forest remains on-track for H1'2024 while Granite Rapids should be out slightly thereafter. Emerald Rapids is also still expected as an evolution of Sapphire Rapids this year.

Intel's open-source Linux engineers have already been busy enabling new Linux functionality around Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids from EDAC reporting to initial AVX10 bits for Granite Rapids, LLVM Clang and GCC compiler targeting, and various kernel additions.

Those are the brief announcements Intel has for Hot Chips 2023 in what should be an exciting next year on the server front. It will be fun to see next year how these next-gen Xeon processors perform under Linux.