Intel Xeon 698X — 86-Core Granite Rapids Workstation Processor

Specifications

Overview

The Intel Xeon 698X is the flagship of the Xeon 600 workstation family, carrying 86 Granite Rapids performance cores with no efficiency cores at all. It is Intel's first return to a boxed workstation processor line in three years and consolidates the previous Xeon W-2500 and W-3500 split into a single Xeon 600 stack.

The platform, rather than the core count, is what matters for AI development work: LGA4710 on the W890 chipset, up to 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, native CXL 2.0 for memory expansion, and validated support for up to eight PCIe 5.0 GPUs in one chassis. Memory capacity reaches 4 TB with MRDIMM support.

Intel AMX now handles INT8, BFLOAT16 and FP16, which materially improves CPU-side inference and pre/post-processing, and the AVX-512 and oneAPI/OpenVINO toolchain is carried forward from the server Xeon 6 line. Intel claims up to 9% higher single-threaded and up to 61% higher multi-threaded performance than the 60-core Sapphire Rapids flagship it replaces.

Key Benefits

86 P-cores with no E-core scheduling complexity. Predictable thread performance for rendering, FEA and CFD. 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes means eight accelerators are not bus-bottlenecked. CXL 2.0 and 4 TB memory support datasets that exceed a conventional desktop memory map. AMX with FP16 offloads quantised inference and preprocessing to the CPU.

Applications

AI development and inference workstations requiring large CPU-side preprocessing; multi-GPU (up to 8) training and fine-tuning nodes; CAE simulation with FEA and CFD solvers; scientific computing and rendering farms; memory-expansion builds using CXL 2.0.

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