Thursday, April 18th 2024
Intel Prepares 500-Watt Xeon 6 SKUs of Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest
Intel is preparing to unveil its cutting-edge Xeon 6 series server CPUs, known as Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest. These forthcoming processors are set to deliver a significant boost in performance, foreshadowing a new era of computing power, albeit with a trade-off in increased power consumption. Two days ago, Yuuki_Ans posted information about the Beechnut City validation platform. Today, he updated the X thread with more information that Intel is significantly boosting core counts across its new Xeon 6 lineup. The flagship Xeon 6 6980P is a behemoth, packing 128 cores with a blistering 500 Watt Thermal Design Power (TDP) rating. In fact, Intel is equipping five of its Xeon 6 CPUs with a sky-high 500 W TDP, including the top four Granite Rapids parts and even the flagship Sierra Forest SKU, which is composed entirely of efficiency cores. This marks a substantial increase from Intel's previous Xeon Scalable processors, which maxed out at 350-385 Watts.
The trade-off for this performance boost is a dramatic rise in power consumption. By nearly doubling the TDP ceiling, Intel can double the core count from 64 to 128 cores on its Granite Rapids CPUs, vastly improving its multi-core capabilities. However, this focus on raw performance over power efficiency means server manufacturers must redesign their cooling solutions to accommodate Intel's flagship 500 W parts adequately. Failure to do so could lead to potential thermal throttling issues. Intel's next-gen Xeon CPU architectures are shaping up to be one of the most considerable generational leaps in recent memory. Still, they come with a trade-off in power consumption that vendors and data centers will need to address. Densely packing thousands of these 500-Watt SKUs will lead to new power and thermal challenges, and we wait to see future data center projects utilizing them.
Sources:
Yuuki_Ans (on X), via Tom's Hardware
The trade-off for this performance boost is a dramatic rise in power consumption. By nearly doubling the TDP ceiling, Intel can double the core count from 64 to 128 cores on its Granite Rapids CPUs, vastly improving its multi-core capabilities. However, this focus on raw performance over power efficiency means server manufacturers must redesign their cooling solutions to accommodate Intel's flagship 500 W parts adequately. Failure to do so could lead to potential thermal throttling issues. Intel's next-gen Xeon CPU architectures are shaping up to be one of the most considerable generational leaps in recent memory. Still, they come with a trade-off in power consumption that vendors and data centers will need to address. Densely packing thousands of these 500-Watt SKUs will lead to new power and thermal challenges, and we wait to see future data center projects utilizing them.
27 Comments on Intel Prepares 500-Watt Xeon 6 SKUs of Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest
2014: "Intel's new 4 GHz CPU comes with better efficiency."
2024: "Intel's new 500 W CPU comes with more cores."
What a way to sell literal shit!
From Anandtech:
Industry: "So by using E-cores we can expect a significant amount of power savings while retaining high density per rack unit?"
Intel:
On a side note with nvidia and intel just generationally ramping up power usage to get better numbers are we going to need 2k watt psu's in two generations?
288 cores at 500W is less than 2W per core, 128 at 500 is 4W per core, it's not like it's worse than what they do on desktop with proper power restriction
If you mix the numbers for e-core and p-core it would be the same configuration as a 13900k at 65W, and by the efficiency test that have been done it's close to peak efficiency for their architecture (and it's also very close to what amd can achieve).
I really don't know from what point of view do you think those are not efficient, I'm sure amd will be better but it's still the best intel can provide.
Having bigger socket with more silicon also means less servers for a given performance target, which cuts the number of servers, switchs and others non-compute related electronics.
All of that means more efficiency, it will also mean big scary number per socket.
You can expect next generation to be even more dense due to next gen packaging enabling more and more silicon per socket, we will reach 700W, then 1kw per socket in the coming years.
You're welcome :D
AMD has taken to stripping cache off the Zen 4 / 5 CPUs, calling them 4c and 5c. That's a bit of a hack. Intel's solution is likely going to be much more effective in the long run.
As far as the use case - high core count for front end and low tier VMs is one of the biggest use cases in a data center. Outside of edge compute and some specific serialized workflows, data centers are mostly serving up jvms and web pages. These take a lot of cores if traffic is high, but not a lot of individual core performance is needed as in most cases they are merely shuffling data back and forth. You throw your low performance high core count chips at those front end use cases, and high performance lower core counts at the back end (database servers).
I'd bet a single CPU of these Granite Rapids Xeon 6's can outperform a whole rack with like 4 blades of S8S 22-core Broadwell-EX servers in some workloads.Considered the 10 nm lithography and extreme clock speeds pushed on i9 SKUs, I'd argue we can't even call Raptor Cove power inefficient. It's just that the TSMC node that Ryzen uses is like three generations ahead by now. These will certainly be energy optimized to reach that wattage target, so it'd be interesting to see metrics against a similar Epyc system.
This TPU write-up is pretty sensationalistic, but short on basic math skills, so you should give it the cynicism it deserves.
From the article:
"By nearly doubling the TDP ceiling, Intel can double the core count from 64 to 128 cores.."
Yeah but no, going from 385W to 500W is a 30% increase. It's nowhere near double, except in core count.
It also has 1/3 more memory channels (16 vs 12) rated for DDR5-6400 vs DDR5-4800 on Bergamo. That alone could account for all of the TDP expansion.
I treat all leaks and rumours with skepticism. We can only judge a product when it launches and is reviewed by competent reviewers.
I also suspect this is specifically for the GR part. I'd be surprised if the SF part is going to draw as much power as GR, so that generalized statement of 500W TDP across two wildly different chips for very different purposes is very suspect. It might be that they both have a 500W max, or maybe the socket has that max, but I can't imagine both chips having the same power profile - that would be absurd.
And here is probably the 500W profile.
288 e-cores, 16 channel DDR5-8800 JEDEC.
or
128 P-cores
AMD better get on it.
wccftech.com/intel-xeon-6-granite-rapids-128-p-core-sierra-forest-288-e-core-cpu-specs-leak-lga-7592-lga-4710-pictured/
These are for enterprise where it's about how much performance you can smash into a space. What once took rooms and rooms or acres and acres of equipment can now be smashed into a single rack.
When your customers are Amazon, Microsoft, facebook, Oracle, and all the others who do real work not idiotic video games these things make sense. If you go around the DC area there are buildings of insane size for miles and miles with their own power plants. It doesn't matter if the power budget of a single CPU doubles if you can pack the performance of an entire row of servers into one rack. You're still ahead at the end of the day.
And it's true as you say, but even if a company is building a lot of large software for distribution etc., that probably happens on a build server, so a few seconds there doesn't really matter. What probably matters a lot more is smaller (re-)compilations on the workstation, which a developer may do dozens of times a day or more, and in this case, higher core performance is a clear benefit.