Behold the Beast: 350W, 80-Core Intel Granite Rapids-SP Spotted
At the outset of last year, Intel introduced the fourth-generation Xeon Scalable Processor, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, and by year’s end, they announced the Emerald Rapids, belonging to the same Eagle Stream platform as the fifth-generation Xeon Scalable Processor. However, it is the imminent arrival of Granite Rapids, part of the new Mountain Stream (or Birch Stream) platform, that promises a significant transformation.
Recently, a snapshot from CPU-Z shared by a netizen revealed an Intel Granite Rapids-SP processor equipped with 80 cores, a maximum turbo frequency of 2.5GHz, and an L3 cache of 672MB, boasting a maximum TDP of 350W. The netizen further clarified in a subsequent tweet that the depicted 320 thread count is the combined total from two processors, with each Granite Rapids-SP processor featuring 80 cores and 160 threads.
Previous reports had indicated that the L3 cache capacity of Granite Rapids was 480MB, 1.5 times that of its predecessor, making the cache size depicted in the latest screenshot substantially larger. This increase in the L3 cache contributes significantly to improvements in artificial intelligence inference, data centers, video encoding, and general computational workloads.
We have previously reported that Granite Rapids represents Intel’s first commercial chip to utilize the Intel 3 process, incorporating Redwood Cove architecture cores. It is capable of supporting 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 12 channels of DDR5-6400 memory. Intel has also disclosed that Granite Rapids will contain multiple chiplets within a single SoC, using EMIB packaging, and will include both HBM and Rambo cache chips.
Leaked images of Granite Rapids hardware have also surfaced, indicating a significantly larger product than current offerings, with an estimated packaging area of 105 × 70.5 mm, which is a 70% increase. The corresponding socket will be the LGA 7529, which, compared to the LGA-4677 socket currently used by Sapphire Rapids, features a 61% increase in contact points, supporting processors with a TDP of up to 500W.
