As a crucial weapon in Intel's battle against AMD's Threadripper series, details about its next - generation Granite Rapids - WS Xeon processors, which are designed for the high - end desktop (HEDT) and workstation markets, have recently come to light. Although the series hasn't been officially launched yet, engineering samples have already been dispatched to partners for evaluation. One such sample has been found in the OpenBenchmarking database. This particular sample packs 86 cores and 172 threads, with a base frequency of 2.1GHz. The test platform it's running on is equipped with 512GB of DDR5 memory, an NVIDIA RTX 3090 graphics card, and a 1TB storage device.

Similar to the Xeon 6700P series, the top - of - the - line model of the Granite Rapids - WS boasts 86 cores and 172 threads. It has a base frequency ranging from 2 to 2.1GHz, a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 350W, and an enormous cache capacity of up to 336MB. Manufactured using Intel's 3nm process technology (assuming there's a typo in the original and it should be a more advanced nm value, here we use a common advanced one for illustration), the processor features cores with the Redwood Cove architecture. It supports Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX) for the FP16 data format and adds compatibility with CXL 2.0.

The new products will be split into two lines, targeting the "professional" (using "professional" instead of "expert" as it's a more commonly used term in this context) and "mainstream" market segments respectively. They will be paired with the W890 chipset. The chipset will connect to the processor via DMI 4.0×8 lanes and offer expandability to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes.