Intel Launches Xeon 600 Workstation Line With Up to 86 Cores and On‑Core AI Acceleration

Overview

• The Granite Rapids‑WS family spans 11 SKUs, with five boxed models for retail; pricing ranges from $499 (Xeon 634) to $7,699 (tray‑only 86‑core Xeon 698X).
• Retail boxed parts include the 64‑core 696X, 48‑core 678X, 32‑core 676X, 24‑core 658X, and 18‑core 654, while the 86‑core flagship is tray‑only.
• Redwood Cove P‑cores with Hyper‑Threading power a platform featuring octa‑channel DDR5 (up to 4 TB), 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, CXL 2.0, and Intel AMX with new FP16 support.
• MRDIMM support debuts in workstations on the top five SKUs, enabling memory speeds up to 8,000 MT/s for bandwidth‑bound workloads.
• Intel cites up to 9% higher single‑thread and 61% higher multi‑thread performance versus refreshed Sapphire Rapids‑WS, with app gains such as a 74% faster Blender Junkshop render and 29% faster Topaz Video Upscaler versus Xeon w9‑3595X.