Intel Unveils Pricing for Granite Rapids Xeon 6900 CPUs: Flagship Model Set at $17,800

Intel has announced pricing for its newest Xeon 6900 CPUs belonging to their Granite Rapids generation, the flagship model costing $17,800 for 128 P-Cores. The Granite Rapids Xeon 6900P CPUs, which were announced just over a week ago, are said to offer up to 90% performance improvement compared to the 5th generation of Intel Xeon processors. The launch event detailed the specifications, but information about the pricing of the different models in the lineup has been revealed only now.

More About Intel Granite Rapids Xeon 6900 CPUs

Intel has just shared the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for each of its four SKUs within the Xeon 6900P family, which features four SKUs ranging from 72 cores to 128 cores. The latest generation not only doubles the cores from the previous flagship processor but also significantly enhances other specifications.

According to the newly announced pricing, the Intel Xeon 6952P is recommended at $11,400, the Xeon 6960P at $13,750, the Xeon 6972P at $14,600, and the Xeon 6980P at $17,800. For comparison, the previous generation’s flagship, the Xeon 8593Q, had a recommended price of $12,400 and offered 64 cores/128 threads, a 320 MB cache, and a thermal design power (TDP) of 385W.

By comparison, the Xeon 6980P has twice as many cores and threads, a bigger 504 MB cache, and runs at a TDP of 500W. It is also supposedly undergoing massive AI improvements—it reportedly offers up to a 1.9x higher geometric mean performance uplift in AI inference based on Intel’s testing efforts. With this, the upcoming Xeon 6900P series could potentially be squaring off against AMD’s unreleased EPYC Turin processors.

This has been a market dominated by AMD‘s EPYC processors, but the Xeon 6900P series should look to compete well with its performance especially as both companies will be on equivalent cores in their data center lineups. Intel says the Xeon 6900P is up to 5.5 times faster on AI inference than current AMD EPYC processors and up to 2.1 times faster in high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. The 128-core chip may also be half as fast again in reports of the next-generation EPYC Turin processor based on AMD Zen 5 architecture.

For this reason, the Intel Xeon 6900 “Granite Rapids” CPU lineup overall looks strong against the upcoming EPYC series, although it’s ultimately going to come down to the actual price/performance provided by both brands which will end up stronger in any given market. We must also remember that the final pricing of Intel Xeon 6900P processors might be different from their characteristic MSRP when such CPUs hit mass retail in June.

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