Intel has turned up swinging at AMD’s Threadripper 9000 with a new batch of Xeon 600 workstation parts that look built for people who think 64 cores is “a start”.
The Xeon 600 workstation family, codenamed Granite Rapids, is aimed at content creators, data scientists, and the usual workstation crowd in AI development, media, energy, life sciences, and finance, replacing the old Xeon W-3500 and W-2500 lines.
Chipzilla has decided the split branding was daft, so mainstream and expert workstation chips now sit under the same Xeon 600 badge rather than being separated into W-2500 and W-3500.
A spokesChipzilla said the Xeon 600 parts were designed to “Unleash Heavy-Duty Compute”, promising higher performance efficiency on an expandable platform with vPro tech and a lot of noise about AI developers.
The stack has 11 SKUs, with six “Expert” parts ending in X and five mainstream models, and the top end uses two compute tiles on the XCC die while the mid-range HCC and smaller LCC variants cover the rest.
At the top sits the Xeon 698X with 86 cores and 172 threads, 336MB of L3 cache, 2.0GHz base and up to 4.8GHz boost, plus a 350W base TDP and 420W maximum turbo power. It also throws in 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 8-channel memory, with DDR5 UDIMM support up to 6,400MT/s and MRDIMM support up to 8,000MT/s, because apparently the electricity bill is somebody else’s problem.
Chipzilla is making a song and dance about the jump from the last flagship Xeon W9-3595X, pointing at 43.3 per cent more cores, nearly three times the L3 cache and higher DDR5 speeds, while also claiming lower base and turbo power figures. It also says it stopped short of the 128 P-core server-class UCC parts because the package is physically massive and would not fit within desktop-like workstation form factors, which is a polite way of saying you would need a chassis the size of a small fridge.
The rest of the line mixes core counts, clocks and power limits but keeps the same platform basics, with AVX-512, AMX support for INT8, bfloat16 and FP16, CXL 2.0 and the usual oneAPI pitch for CPU, GPU and FPGA tooling. On the security side, Chipzilla is leaning on vPro features such as total memory encryption, trusted execution, virtualisation technology for security and active management, plus remote erase and one-click recovery.
Pricing is where the bragging gets loud. The 86-core Xeon 698X is listed at $7,699, the 64-core Xeon 696X at $5,599, and the rest steps down to a 12-core Xeon 634 at $499, with a mix of 8-channel and 4-channel memory configurations. In comparison, AMD’s 96-core Threadripper 9995WX at $11,699 and the 64-core 9985WX at about $8,000, while Chipzilla’s 64-core part sits at $5,599.
The other bit Chipzilla wants you to notice is overclocking, which is still a funny thing to see on Xeon without doing a double take. All X models are unlocked, and Chipzilla is adding telemetry features such as undervolt protection, voltage baselines, max-voltage limit reporting, and per-die reporting on why limits are being hit, alongside core, mesh, and turbo tuning options.
There is a partnership with OCBASE to add Xeon 600 tuning to the OCCT app, offering dynamic controls, Linux and Windows support, enhanced telemetry and stability testing, and configurable benchmarking. Chipzilla and ASUS are even claiming that an overclocking session on a Xeon 698X with an ASUS W890 board netted 10 world records and 10 global firsts, because nothing says “workstation reliability” like chasing trophies.
All of this sits on a new W890 platform using the LGA 4710-2 (V2) socket, replacing W790 and bringing in the usual platform tick boxes such as Wi-Fi 7, 2.5GbE options, USB 3.2 at 20G, SATA, and a range of PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset. W890 boards are spec’d for up to 4TB of DDR5 in 8-channel configurations and 2TB in 4-channel setups, and the pitch is clear multi-GPU readiness for heavy compute and AI workloads.
Chipzilla’s performance claims lean on SPECworkstation 4.0 comparisons against the Xeon W9-3595X, with uplifts it says include 17 per cent in AI and machine learning, 22 per cent in energy and 61 per cent in financial services, plus smaller bumps in media and life sciences.
It throws in engineering and content creation numbers like 29 per cent faster virtualisation in Dassault Systèmes, 30 per cent faster CFD solving in OpenFOAM and 74 per cent faster rendering in Blender’s CPU Junkshop scene, while name-dropping AMX gains for AI video upscaling in TopazLabs.
Chipzilla says Xeon 600 platforms and CPUs will be available from late March, with boxed chips for the 696X, 678X, 676X, 658X and 654, and hardware partners name-checked, including the Grey Box Shifter, HP, Lenovo, BOXX and Puget Systems, which is a tidy way of saying the OEM machine churn is ready to start.
