With Granite Rapids, Intel is back to trading blows with AMD
Over the past few years, we've grown accustomed to Xeon processors that, generation after generation, come up short of the competition on some combination of core count, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, or PCIe connectivity.
With the launch of its Granite Rapids Xeons on Tuesday, Intel is finally closing the gap, and it may just be a turning point for a product line that has gained a reputation for too little, too late.
The 6900P processor family represents the chipmaker's top tier of datacenter chips with up to 128 full-fat performance cores (P-cores), 256 threads, and clock speeds peaking at 3.9 GHz.
That not only puts Granite Rapids at core-count parity with AMD's now year-old Bergamo platform, it makes it a direct competitor to its rival's upcoming Turin Epycs with its 128 Zen 5 cores.
To be clear, Turin will actually top out at 192 cores, as CEO Lisa Su was keen to point out during her Computex keynote this spring. However, that part will use a more compact Zen 5C core which trades clocks and presumably per-core cache for compute density.
