After nearly three years, Intel is returning to the desktop workstation with the anticipated Granite Rapids WS series, now called Xeon 600. The new series covers all of Intel’s bases for desktop workstations with the previous-gen Sapphire Rapids. WS/Intel split its products between two lineups: Zeon W2500 and Zeon W3500, but all Granite Rapids workstation chips will use the same Xeon 600 branding.
Granite Rapids has been in the data center for about 1.5 years. During that time, AMD introduced its Zen 5-based Threadripper 9000 chips, leaving an open slot for Intel to release its next-generation workstation CPUs. Intel has eleven SKUs for Xeon 600, five of which will be available as boxed models for retail sale. Intel hasn’t provided a firm release date for the CPUs, but says the new W890 motherboards and systems from brands like Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro, and Puget will be available starting in late March.
Compared to refreshed Sapphire Rapids WS parts, Intel claims Xeon 600 delivers up to 9% better single-core performance and up to 61% higher multi-threaded performance. The higher multi-threaded performance comes from much higher code numbers on 8.86 cores and the Xeon 696X with 64 cores.
Like its data center counterpart, Xeon 600 chips use the Redwood Co. micro-architecture that debuted in Intel’s Meteor Lake mobile chips. Here, the core count is scaled up and, following Intel’s new split of Xeon CPUs into heterogeneous architectures, the Xeon 600 CPUs use only P-cores with hyper-threading.
The full list of Xeon 600SK ranges from $499 for the 12-core Xeon 634 up to $7,699 for the flagship Xeon 698X. This split largely mirrors AMD’s approach with Threadripper 9000 chips, where the main range tops out at 64 cores, while the Threadripper Pro 9000 WX range reaches 96 cores.
Short of the bottom three SKUs, some platform features are consistent across the Xeon 600-range X-Series SKUs:
- They are unlocked for overclocking.
- All octa-channel memory supports speeds up to 6400.
- You also get 128p CLE 5.0 Lens, CXL 2.0 Support, and an intense AMX accelerator in each CPU core, which now supports FP16 instructions.
The chips support up to 40 TB of memory, doubling what’s available on AMD’s Threadripper 9000WX range and quadrupling support compared to the base Threadripper 9000 range. Even an A1 TB kit of DDR5 6400 RDIMMs costs about $28,000 right now, bringing support for MRDIMMs(multiplexed rank DIMMs).
MRDI MMS are supported in the data center with Xeon 6 CPUs, but this is the first time we’re seeing them in workstation chips. MRDIMMs include two ranks of memory chips, each with a multiplexer chip. The multiplexer combines the bandwidth of both ranks, doubling the transfer rate. In the case of Xeon 600, with support for up to 8000 MT/s.
MRDI-MMs use the same physical connector as RDI-MMs, so they fit into existing connectors if the CPU supports MRDI-MMs. MRDI-MMs are only relevant in HPC settings where memory bandwidth build is critical, so Intel isn’t supporting them across the full stack. They are only supporting the top 5 SKUs, starting from the Xeon 678X.
Intel broadly claims a 9% improvement in single-core performance with the Xeon 600 series compared to the Xeon W2500 and Xeon W3500, according to Intel. These numbers come from Cinebench 2026 scores, as you can see. The disclaimers and configurations are included at the end of the gallery below.
Looking at the spec workstation for Intel, it says the flagship Xeon 698X offers:
- a 17% improvement in AI
- 22% in the energy sub-category
- 61% in financial services
- 19% in life sciences
- 10% in media and entertainment
compared to the Xeon W9-3595X. In the productivity category, the Xeon 698X boasted identical performance, while in product design, it showed an undisclosed regression.
In specific apps, Intel says the Xeon 698X finished the Blender Junction Render 74% faster than the Xeon W-3595X and sped up AI-powered upscaling with Topaz Labs Video Upscaler by 29%. Intel attributes the latter speedup to the AMX accelerators in the Xeon 600-core chips. To that end, Intel is introducing Open Image Denoise 2.4, which it says is accelerated by FP16 instructions, Available in Xeon 600 AMX.
In development, data analysis, and AI interpretation:
- 24% better linear algebra performance (as measured in algorithms in Intel’s form of NumPy/SCIPY)
- 18% faster large data set analysis with spec workstation 4s data science workload
- 16% faster AI inference with spec workstation 4s ONNX inference test
In particular, Intel didn’t share any competitive benchmarks for Threadripper 9000 during a press Q&A session. Intel’s Jonathan Patten said, “We’re looking to be very competitive within the market, offering better performance per dollar for more value for the workstation spend. This is a very highly expandable platform. We have up to 4 TB of memory capacity, supporting two DI/MMs per channel. Our competitors do not. We have advanced instruction sets, AMX, as we mentioned a little bit, and our vPro technology, so we continue to offer a very competitive platform.”
Hopefully, we’ll have those comparisons soon. Intel says Xeon 600 motherboards with the W890 chipset will launch in late March, as will workstations from OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and Supermacro. We still haven’t learned about a firm release date, let alone a release window, for boxed Xeon 600 chips.
