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In brief: Leaked benchmarks are giving us a taste of Intel's upcoming Granite Rapid server chips' incredible specs – think 120 P-cores and 240 threads. With nearly 1.5GB of total cache in a dual state, these chips look like they have AMD's latest Epyc offerings squarely in their sights.
The first Granite Rapids chip to surface is the Xeon 6900P, which was recently spotted on Geekbench by the leak account BenchLeaks. This 120-P-core, 240-thread beast achieved a single-core score of 1,021 and a multi-core score of 7,155 in a dual-CPU setup running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The 6900P is rocking a massive 744MB of total cache, split between 240MB of L2 and 504MB of L3. With nearly a gigabyte of cache, it leaves Intel's current chip kings – Emerald Rapids and Sapphire Rapids – in the dust.
[GB6 CPU] Unknown CPU
– Benchleaks (@BenchLeaks) August 14, 2024
CPU: GENUINE INTEL XEON (240C 480T [2 CPUs])
Min/Max/Avg: 1781/1792/1790 MHz
CPUID: A06D0 (GenuineIntel)
Single: 1021
Multi: 7155https://t.co/2TeuZUB3xn
Perhaps more impressively, the chip was capped at a lowly 1.8GHz base clock, so it definitely wasn't flexing its full performance potential. Moreover, this is still an engineering sample, so you can basically ditch these numbers since the actual product will likely perform very differently.
However, even in this hobbled state, a dual 6900P setup boasts 240-cores and 480-threads with nearly 1.5GB of total cache. Slap it in a system with 2TB of DDR5 memory like the test rig, and you've got an excellent number-crunching machine.
Of course, with great power comes... well, great power consumption. Leaks suggest the top Granite Rapids chips could consume over 500 watts apiece. A dual-socket config is basically a massive 1kW-sipping unit at that point. But when you're building dense data center servers, configuring them with elaborate cooling is just part of the package.
Granite Rapids is slated to launch sometime in 2024, going head-to-head with AMD's upcoming 128-core Zen 5 Epyc chips. There's also an E-core focused Sierra Forest version coming down the pipeline, scaling up to a ludicrous 288 cores to battle AMD's 192-core Zen 5c units.