Intel is currently preparing a serious rival to AMD's Threadripper 9000WX series: Granite Rapids-WS. The company has been mainly out of competition with AMD in the server market, with Granite Rapids restoring core parity between the two only last year. Granite Rapids-WS now looks to gain even more ground with potentially class-leading specs in the workstation space. Seasoned leaker momomo_us has seemingly found out every SKU that will be part of this lineup, along with a few details that can help us speculate.
According to the post and its reply, Granite Rapids-WS will reportedly have at least 11 models in total, with the Xeon 698X being the flagship, clocked at 2.0 GHz (base), and carrying 336 MB of combined cache. On the other hand, the Xeon 634 will be the lowest-end offering, with only a 48 MB cache pool and a base clock of 2.7 GHz. We didn't get specific core counts, but it's reasonable to expect Intel's next-gen "extreme" Xeon chips to top out at 128 cores, since the current-gen 6980P also rocks the same config, which the 698X is likely an offshoot of.
GNR-WS 🤔678X : 2.40GHz 192M676X : 2.80GHz 144M674X : 3.00GHz 144M658X : 3.00GHz 144M656 : 2.90GHz 72M654 : 3.10GHz 72M638 : 3.20GHz 72M636 : 3.50GHz 48M634 : 2.70GHz 48MNovember 15, 2025
To achieve such a high core count, Intel uses three compute tiles, and the same layout on Granite Rapids-WS should allow it to pass even the flagship Threadripper 9995WX's mighty 96 cores. On the server side, EPYC 9965 has Xeon beat, though, so the Blue Team can pull a reverse and take the lead in the workstation market. Granite Rapids-WS is expected to be fabricated on the Intel 3 process and will work on the company's W980 platform. The architecture itself has tough competition ahead, considering how efficient Zen 5 is.
One chip from the GNR-WS lineup already has its first benchmarks out in the wild, thanks to an early GeekBench listing spotted by BenchLeaks. The mid-tier Xeon 654 scored 2,634 points in the single-core test and 14,743 points in the multi-core test. More importantly, we find out that this chip has 18 cores and 32 threads. Interestingly, there's no 18-core SKU in the Granite Rapids server series, so we don't have a direct point of reference. The processor boosted to 4.77 GHz with a minimum reported speed of 2.9 GHz, close enough to the 3.1 GHz base clocks the leak mentioned.
Unfortunately, that's where the details end and speculation begins. A couple of months ago, we covered another Granite Rapids-WS chip with 86 cores and 172 threads, operating at 4.8GHz — we can now safely assume that was the Xeon 678X. Granite Rapids-WS seems to have significantly less cache across the board, likely to manage costs for a workstation audience, compared to data centers that can pay much more. Intel's next-gen Xeons are shaping up nicely against AMD's Threadripper, with heated competition on the horizon for the first time in a while.
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