- Intel Granite Rapids-WS listing seen online shows 86 cores with 172 threads
- Reference entry suggests 4.8 GHz turbo boost speeds on limited cores
- Granite Rapids-WS could be a serious challenge for AMD Threadripper
Intel is on something of a roll right now, with major investments from the US government and Nvidia, plus possible future interest from other members of the Magnificent 7, and now, a new benchmark listing may have revealed its most ambitious workstation chip yet.
Hardware leaker @momomo_us on
The entry shows clock speeds reaching 4.8GHz, although this is likely a turbo figure for a small number of cores rather than an all-core base.
Taking on AMD’s Threadripper
Key details, including thermal design power and full platform specifications, were not provided, so the filing should be treated as an early leak rather than a confirmation of final specifications.
TechPowerUp says Granite Rapids-WS is derived from Intel’s XCC server compute dies, which combine two compute tiles for the 86 cores along with two I/O tiles for PCIe and memory connectivity.
Achieving a higher core count would likely require a larger UCC chip from Intel and a larger package.
Memory support for this workstation SKU is also not yet known.
The server-grade XCC family supports DDR5-6400, with higher speeds possible using MR-DIMMs, and a workstation variant could adopt an eight-channel design to balance capacity with board complexity.
Cooling requirements also remain a mystery, as no base clock or thermal envelope was included.
The test system, shown in the OpenBenchmarking.org entry (which you can see above), included 512GB of memory, a 1TB Seagate ZP1000GM3004 SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6.
The system also reported using GCC 11.5.0, GNOME Shell 40.10, and an X Server display driver.
Intel has recently reduced its focus on high-end desktops, leaving professionals to choose between older workstation parts or AMD’s offerings.
If the details are accurate, Granite Rapids-WS could provide Intel with a quick route back to the HEDT and workstation segment, where AMD’s Threadripper has dominated.
For OEMs and creators, real-world adoption of Granite Rapids-WS will depend on ultimate performance, efficiency, software scalability, and how convincingly the chip challenges AMD’s Threadripper dominance.
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