Intel Launches Xeon 6900P Series "Granite Rapids" Processors

Building off the launch earlier this year of the first Xeon 6 processors with the Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" processors, today Intel is lifting the wraps on the much anticipated Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors. Where as Sierra Forest is optimized for power efficiency and core density, the Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors are optimized for per-core performance and have shown some very strong generational uplift -- and against the AMD competition -- as we'll show today in the first Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks.

Intel held briefings in Oregon last week to go over the initial Xeon 6900P processors as part of their Enterprise Tech Tour. A lot of the Xeon 6 information was previously disclosed by Intel but they also revealed Granite Rapids benchmark results, the SKU table for the Xeon 6900P processors, and more.

Intel is claiming up to 5.5x higher AI inferencing performance over AMD EPYC and up to 2.1x higher HPC performance over AMD EPYC. With the very lofty AI inferencing claims, it comes down to software able to effectively leverage Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). As we have shown with prior Xeon Sapphire Rapids / Emerald Rapids, AMX can make quite an impact for capable AI workloads.

Intel's numbers show big generational gains going from prior Emerald Rapids processors to Granite Rapids. I ended up being very impressed with the Granite Rapids performance in the lab and have my own benchmarks to share today as well. Particularly for HPC and technical computing workloads, Granite Rapids is especially strong.

Xeon 6900P processors support up to DDR5-6400 memory, up to 8800 MT/s MRDIMMs, up to 128 cores, six UPI 2.0 links, up to 96 lanes of PCI Express 5.0, and L3 cache sizes up to 504MB.

MRDIMMs with Xeon 6900P are quite exciting for really helping increase system memory bandwidth... Check out my benchmark results for a ton more benchmarks. I'll have up DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800 benchmarks in the coming days on Phoronix.

Intel Xeon 6900P series feature CXL 2.0 support. Intel engineers have also been doing much of the CXL enablement upstreaming within the Linux kernel.

And what most of you are eager to see... The Xeon 6900P SKU table. It's much smaller than we are used to seeing for Intel Xeon launches where there can be dozens of different SKUs. Keep in mind though this is just the Xeon 6900P line-up while the Xeon 6700P and others will come later. The flagship Granite Rapids processor is the Xeon 6980P offering 128 cores with a 2.0GHz base clock and 3.9GHz maximum turbo clock with 3.2GHz all-core turbo. The Xeon 6980P has 504MB of L3 cache and 500 Watt TDP rating. The Xeon 6900P series currently bottoms out at the Xeon 6960P with 72 cores and an all-core turbo of 3.8GHz and 432MB L3 cache while maintaining a 500 Watt TDP.

All of the Xeon 6900P processors support up to 12 channel DDR5-6400 / MRDIMM-8800 memory, 2S scalability, 4/4/4/4 DSA / UAA / QAT / DLB accelerators, 1024 TDX keys, six UPI links, and 96 PCIe lanes. Nice seeing all of the uniformity between the Xeon 6900P models for a pleasant change.

Intel hasn't publicly disclosed the Xeon 6900P pricing as of writing. Then again it can be highly volatile and the major CSPs/hyperscalers often seeing steep discounts. So for now there's nothing to share on the pricing front.

Intel barely talked at all about their accelerators with Granite Rapids -- quite a stark difference from when they were introduced with the Sapphire Rapids launch. The accelerators are there but the software ecosystem support remains less than ideal and the performance benefits can vary highly depending upon the software and data set size. From what I'm hearing, the Intel accelerator story is most convincing around networking/telco and select edge use-cases.

Another reason the IAA / DSA accelerators may have received little coverage during the Granite Rapids event... They can't be assigned securely to VMs. Back in August I wrote about Intel's Current IAA & DSA Accelerators Aren't Safe For VMs Due To A Security Issue. In there I noted that the new device IDs for marking the IAA and DSA accelerators as secure are just for Diamond Rapids and Granite Rapids D. Indeed I was able to confirm that the Xeon 6900P Granite Rapids processors suffer from this same security issue as Sapphire Rapids / Emerald Rapids / Sierra Forest. So without being able to assign the accelerators to VMs, there's likely not much of a cloud play this generation for the accelerator IP at least for public CSPs.

Early next year Intel is still pacing for introducing the Xeon 6900E series Sierra Forest processors at up to 288 cores per socket as well as introducing the Xeon 6700P / Xeon 6500P / Xeon 6300P Granite Rapids processors and the Xeon 6 SoC Granite Rapids D offering.

That's the brief overview of the Xeon 6900P series... Now let's move on to the Intel Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks for performance compared to prior Intel Xeon processors and the AMD EPYC competition.