Intel Xeon 600 CPUs Arrive for Workstations

Intel's Xeon 600 series is here, providing new competition for AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series of workstation CPUs. The new processors, which were codenamed Granite Rapids-WS, are aimed at businesses involved in AI development, 3D rendering, data analysis, and other compute-intensive tasks. Intel is releasing 11 models with processor core counts ranging from 86 at the high end to 12 for the base model.

The node for these CPUs is Intel 3 (3nm), rather than the new 18A process. That means they missed out on Intel's switch to the gate-all-around transistor structure that 18A uses. But with up to 86 Redwood Cove Performance cores and as much as 336MB of L3 cache, they're intriguing. The Xeon 698X has a top frequency of 4.8GHz with Turbo Boost, from a 2.0GHz base clock. And it has 128 PCIe 5 lanes for speedy data transfer and multi-GPU ...