6th Gen Intel Xeon "Granite Rapids" CPU L3 Cache Totals 480 MB

[T0@st]

Intel has recently updated its Software Development Emulator (now version 9.33.0)—InstLatX64 noted some intriguing cache designations for Fifth Generation Xeon Scalable Processors. The "Emerald Rapids" family was introduced at last December's "AI Everywhere" event—with sample units released soon after for review. Tom's Hardware was impressed by the Platinum 8592+ CPU's tripled L3 Cache (over the previous generation): "(it) contributed significantly to gains in Artificial Intelligence inference, data center, video encoding, and general compute workloads. While AMD EPYC generally remains the player to beat in the enterprise CPU space, Emerald Rapids marks a significant improvement from Intel's side of that battlefield, especially as it pertains to Artificial Intelligence workloads and multi-core performance in general."

Intel's SDE 9.33.0 update confirms 320 MB of L3 cache for "Emerald Rapids," but the next line down provides a major "Granite Rapids" insight—480 MB of L3 cache, representing a 2.8x leap over the previous generation. Team Blue's 6th Gen (all P-core) Xeon processor series is expected to launch within the latter half of 2024. The American multinational technology company is evidently keen to take on AMD in the enterprise CPU market segment, although Team Red is already well ahead with its current crop of L3 cache designations. EPYC CPUs in Genoa and Genoa-X guises offer maximum totals of 384 MB and 1152 MB (respectively). Intel's recently launched "Emerald Rapids" server chips are observed as being a good match against Team Red EPYC "Bergamo" options.



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[Deleted member 237269]

Good news for us. Let’s see the prices when it’s released

 

[Nanochip]

Competition is great for consumers, if the competing firms innovate and offer excellent solutions to the market place at affordable prices. AMD lit a fire under intel’s ass with zen and chiplet, and in response Intel must adapt or die. So hopefully the upcoming Xeons and Lakes are much better than prior iterations and more power efficient. Emerald rapids was a step in the right direction but raptor lake refresh was not.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

If you needed any more evidence that AMD is steering the x86 ship....

 

[Deleted member 57642]

I get that it's quite high for CPU Cache, but can't help it.... 480 Mb sounds so '90s.

 

[AnotherReader]

I get that it's quite high for CPU Cache, but can't help it.... 480 Mb sounds so '90s.

That would have been a fairly large amount of RAM by consumer standards even for the late 1990s. In the fall of 1999, Anandtech reviewed the first 180 nm Pentium III in a system equipped with 128 MB of Rambus DRAM. Now if you are thinking of non-volatile storage, affordable hard drives in the early 1990s were still smaller than 480 MB.

 

[Squared]

Maybe Intel is increasing the cache per core, or maybe Intel is increasing the cache to accommodate more cores. Like 96 cores instead of 64. Intel just increased the cache substantially going from Sapphire Rapids to Emerald Rapids, like was done with the consumer equivalents moving from Alder Lake to Raptor Lake. Since the consumer version of Granite Rapids, Meteor Lake, has the same cache configuration as Raptor Lake, Granite Rapids too probably has the same cache per core as Emerald Rapids.

 

[Tomorrow]

That would have been a fairly large amount of RAM by consumer standards even for the late 1990s. In the fall of 1999, Anandtech reviewed the first 180 nm Pentium III in a system equipped with 128 MB of Rambus DRAM. Now if you are thinking of non-volatile storage, affordable hard drives in the early 1990s were still smaller than 480 MB.

Even in the mid 2000's OEM's were happily selling PC's with 512MB of DRAM (best case it was two sticks of 256MB DDR).
I remember building a high end system at the time that had 2GB total (4x512MB). Major overkill at the time along with dual core CPU and GTX 7900.

Also it's uncanny that this year both AMD and Intel have their Granite:
Granite Ridge
Granite Rapids

 

[Minus Infinity]

If only Turin wasn't just around the corner, some people might get excited.

 

[unwind-protect]

I just wish that these things would boot without RAM. With half a GB you could boot a Linux kernel and move some files around or whatever.

 

[Beermotor]

If only Turin wasn't just around the corner, some people might get excited.

Yep, given that AMD's Genoa-X Epyc has 1.1 Gigabytes of cache, Intel showing up with a 480 megabyte Xeon is kind of like watching a John Wayne Bobbit porn flick.

You know it's going to be so incredibly fucked-up but you have to watch to see if they'll actually try.