Intel's latest flagship 128-core Xeon CPU costs $17,800 — Granite Rapids sets a new high pricing watermark
When Intel formally introduced its Xeon 6 6900-series 'Granite Rapids' on September 24, it didn't announce pricing, which was a bit surprising. However, after some prodding, the company has now added pricing to its Ark database. As it turns out, Intel's flagship Xeon 6980P processor with 128 high-performance cores costs $17,800, the highest pricing we've seen for a modern x86 CPU — significantly more than AMD's EPYC 'Genoa' 9654 offering with 96 cores, which costs $11,805.
In fact, at $17,800, Intel's Xeon 6980P is the most expensive standard CPU launched in recent years. Intel could not match AMD in terms of core count and multi-thread performance for years, so it didn't give its chips extreme price tags over the last few years. By contrast, AMD needed to grab market share away from Intel, so while its EPYC processors were expensive, they were not that expensive.
Formally, Intel's 28-core Xeon Scalable 8280L (with support for up to 4.5TB of DDR4-2933 memory, an amount that even Xeon 6980P cannot handle) launched at $17,906 in Q2 2019, but got a price cut to $14,898 shortly thereafter.
