Intel Xeon Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest to Feature up to 500 Watt TDP and 12-Channel Memory

[AleksandarK]

Today, thanks to Yuuki_Ans on the Chinese Bilibili forum, we have more information about the upcoming "Avenue City" platform that powers Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest. Intel's forthcoming Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest Xeon processors will diverge the Xeon family into two offerings: one optimized for performance/core equipped with P-cores and the other for power/core equipped with E-cores. The reference platform Intel designs and shares with OEMs internally is a 16.7" x 20" board with 20 PCB layers, made as a dual-socket solution. Featuring two massive LGA-7529 sockets, the reference design shows the basic layout for a server powered by these new Xeons.

Capable of powering Granite Rapids / Sierra Forest-AP processors of up to 500 Watts, the platform also accommodates next-generation I/O. Featuring 24 DDR5 DIMMs with support for 12-channel memory, with memory speeds of up to 6400 MT/s. The PCIe selection includes six PCIe Gen 5 x16 links supporting CXL cache coherent protocol and 6x24 UPI links. Additionally, we have another piece of information that Granite Rapids will come with up to 128 cores and 256 threads in both regular and HBM-powered Xeon Max flavoring. You can see storage and reference platform configuration details on the slides below.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[watzupken]

Oh no... The E-cores are spreading to even enterprise CPUs. I really wonder if corporates will be willing to pay a lot of money for a bunch of E-cores...

 

[fancucker]

Yet Intel retains 70 percent of server CPU market share. And their customers are far better informed than the odd commentator online. Their custom accelerators will revolutionize the market too.

 

[lemonadesoda]

e-cores are fine for fileservers, domain controllers, webservers, IoT i/o controllers

p-cores are needed for compute

horses for courses

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Yet Intel retains 70 percent of server CPU market share. And their customers are far better informed than the odd commentator online. Their custom accelerators will revolutionize the market too.

A lot of that market share is due to a "captive audience", in other words, by companies with multi-year contracts (who signed those contracts prior to AMD Epyc being an option), by companies who already purchased 4th gen xeons years ago expecting them to have been delivered prior tommultiple delays, and to companies who for various reasons, can't swap over their entire infrastructure at the moment (e.g. their current hardware hasnt been used long enough to get the desired return on their imvestment).

Genoa destroys 4th gen xeons in almost every benchmark, are cheaper, more power efficient, have more PCIe lanes, more memory channels, more cores (that are stronger)and are basically better in every way save for a few niche applications that can utilize the special accelerators Intel put into the chips (which BTW, a customer has to pay EXTRA for to unlock). It's already been rumored that Zen5 will have acceleratorsas well as AMD will be utilizing the IP it acquired from Xilinx, also up to 256 Zen5 cores, and perhaps (like Bergamo) a cloud optimized product with even more than 256 cores...but anyway, based on how Genoa outperforms 4th gen in almost every way, it's safe to assume that (aside from the customers who might need those specific accelerators in the xeons) Intel is maintaining 70% marketshare due to the reasons I stated above, and NOT because 4th gen xeons are a superior product, evidence of that can be seen in the constant growth of AMD's presence in the enterprise market at Intel's expense quarter after quarter. After all, In many ways, the Zen architectures are enterprise focused first and just happen to be also good at gaming and consumer applications, which makes sense considering the enterprise x86 segment represents a larger T.A.M. than consumer desktop.

 

[Daven]

I wonder if you can mix and match both types of CPUs between the two sockets on one board.

 

[qlum]

Oh no... The E-cores are spreading to even enterprise CPUs. I really wonder if corporates will be willing to pay a lot of money for a bunch of E-cores...

e-cores are especially useful for servers where taks are very much parallel in these cases and the cores are very much size if the e-cores are half as fast but you can fit 3x as many in
, it's still a win in the server space, depending on the workload.

 

[Daven]

A lot of that market share is due to a "captive audience", in other words, by companies with multi-year contracts (who signed those contracts prior to AMD Epyc being an option), by companies who already purchased 4th gen xeons years ago expecting them to have been delivered prior tommultiple delays, and to companies who for various reasons, can't swap over their entire infrastructure at the moment (e.g. their current hardware hasnt been used long enough to get the desired return on their imvestment).

Genoa destroys 4th gen xeons in almost every benchmark, are cheaper, more power efficient, have more PCIe lanes, more memory channels, more cores (that are stronger)and are basically better in every way save for a few niche applications that can utilize the special accelerators Intel put into the chips (which BTW, a customer has to pay EXTRA for to unlock). It's already been rumored that Zen5 will have acceleratorsas well as AMD will be utilizing the IP it acquired from Xilinx, also up to 256 Zen5 cores, and perhaps (like Bergamo) a cloud optimized product with even more than 256 cores...but anyway, based on how Genoa outperforms 4th gen in almost every way, it's safe to assume that (aside from the customers who might need those specific accelerators in the xeons) Intel is maintaining 70% marketshare due to the reasons I stated above, and NOT because 4th gen xeons are a superior product, evidence of that can be seen in the constant growth of AMD's presence in the enterprise market at Intel's expense quarter after quarter. After all, In many ways, the Zen architectures are enterprise focused first and just happen to be also good at gaming and consumer applications, which makes sense considering the enterprise x86 segment represents a larger T.A.M. than consumer desktop.

The other problem with volume marketshare is that it doesn’t take into account dollar share. Even if Intel can maintain large volumes, it cannot maintain operations if the amount per CPU goes way down. Many customers are buying lower margin 1- and 2- socket enterprise level CPUs and then backfilling the rest of the compute power with GPUs.

Intel’s highest margins in the past came from 4- and 8- socket CPUs. Those days are gone now that GPUs rule and Intel’s margins and revenue continue to decline.

Edit: Here are Intel’s gross margins over the years. Not looking so great.

 

[Frick]

Oh no... The E-cores are spreading to even enterprise CPUs. I really wonder if corporates will be willing to pay a lot of money for a bunch of E-cores...

Blergh and sigh. Not everything is about games.

 

[Wirko]

Oh no... The E-cores are spreading to even enterprise CPUs. I really wonder if corporates will be willing to pay a lot of money for a bunch of E-cores...

They *will* pay a lot of money for Intel E-cores, as well as AMD E-cores, whatever they will be called. They will pay a lot for Arm E-cores too (their strength is in their numbEr, not individual Performance).

 

[unwind-protect]

Their custom accelerators will revolutionize the market too.

Nah, those will go the way of Itanium. Requirements change too quickly.

 

[Wirko]

AMD will be utilizing the IP it acquired from Xilinx

Possibly, things such as networking IP. But if you're holding your breath for FPGAs inside processors - don't.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Oh no... The E-cores are spreading to even enterprise CPUs. I really wonder if corporates will be willing to pay a lot of money for a bunch of E-cores...

And AMD is prepping all Bergamo core Epyc cpu's. The successor to Genoa, Turin is said to offer a 256 Zen 5c core version and Genoa might see a 128 Zen 4c core version. 4c cores should be a lot stronger than Gracemont cores too.

Like it or not hybrid is the way of the future. I have no problem with that.