Intel launches Xeon 6500/6700 processors with performance cores

Intel has expanded its Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' family of CPUs featuring high-performance cores with new offerings targeting AI, content delivery, networking, and storage applications. The new Xeon 6500 and Xeon 6700 series processors are designed for single-socket and multi-socket servers and feature up to 86 high-performance cores, an eight-channel memory subsystem, and up to 136 PCIe lanes to connect to various accelerators, such as AI processors. 

Intel's Xeon 6500 and Xeon 6700-series processors feature up to 86 cores. They are aimed at 1P, 2P, 4P, and 8P machines, thus serving a very wide range of applications, starting from entry-level single-processor machines all the way to enterprise-grade 8-way machines that are used to run business-critical and mission-critical workloads. 

The CPUs support up to 4TB of memory and feature up to eight DDR5 memory channels supporting DDR5-5200 (2 DPC), DDR5-6400 (1 DPC), and DDR5-8000 MRDIMM (1DPC) modules, up to four UPI 2.0 links at 24 GT/s, up to 88 PCIe lanes for multi-socket systems or up to 136 PCIe lanes for single-socket designs (as Intel re-used UPI links for CPU-to-CPU connectivity as PCIe links). In addition, the CPUs support 64 PCIe lanes with CXL 2.0 on top, as well as Intel AMX and AVX-512 for AI and media coding acceleration. 

As the CPUs feature up to 86 cores, the maximum thermal design power of Xeon 6500 and Xeon 6700-series CPUs does not exceed 350W. Intel says it has maximized per-core performance, which would benefit various applications. While Intel claims the new chips are faster than their predecessors by 14% - 54%, depending on the workload, the relatively low core count and frequency pretty much limit usage of Intel's Xeon 6500/6700 processors to applications that do not benefit from the extreme core count of 128 per socket and do not need maximum per-core performance.

Arguably, Intel does it to ensure that its most expensive Xeon 6900P-series processors remain CPUs of choice for performance-demanding workloads. Nonetheless, if a company wants to build an 8-way machine with the maximum possible number of cores (688), it will have to choose a Xeon 6700P CPU. 

One of the interesting features of Intel's Xeon 6500 and Xeon 6700-series processors is support of the Intel TDX Connect technology that enables encrypted connection between the CPU and PCIe devices with direct memory access and lower overhead, which allows transferring confidential data to be processed on the GPU, which will be useful for various workloads, including AI. 

Since Intel's Xeon 6500/6700-series processors feature a lower number of cores, they use fewer Granite Rapids compute chiplets: one (for SKUs with up to 48 cores) or two (for up to 86-core models). Also, the new CPUs use a smaller LGA4710-2 packaging and are compatible with Intel's Socket E2, so they are not compatible with platforms for Intel's Xeon 6700E and 6900P. 

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In addition to launching Xeon 6500 and Xeon 6700-series processors for mainstream servers, Intel also unveiled Xeon 6300-series processors with up to eight cores for uniprocessor servers as well as Intel Xeon 6 SoC processors with up to 72 cores that feature Intel vRAN and Media Transcode accelerators as well as integrated Intel Ethernet for enterprise edge servers and network appliances.

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