In the last times, Intel, at least apparently, is putting the batteries back into its CPUs for workstations and servers. We are referring to the Xeon that will appear in the next year. The latest information? Well, they have to do with Granite Rapids and the LGA-4710 socket in addition to the reference platform beechnut city.
By 2024, and if things don’t get complicated again, Intel will launch two different Xeon families on the market. The first one is Sierra Forest. Designed for cloud computing, it uses the same socket as current Xeons, but replaces the 60 P-Core cores with up to 144 cores of the E-Core type. The other is Granite Rapids, which is the true successor. In this case, this CPU does require a new socket. This is designed for much more modest systems than a high-performance server, but at the same time, above a high-end PC.
This is what the Intel Xeon Granite Rapids looks like in LGA-4710 socket
It should not surprise us that both the best-selling Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC are not their maximum configurations, but more modest ones. These versions usually have more cores than the Ryzen 9 or the more powerful Core i9, but at the same time, due to their lower core count, they end up using much simpler sockets. Its objective? Workstations or, failing that, servers that are not aimed at large companies, but at smaller ones, which do not require as many computing resources. Nor do they have budgets to choose the best of each company.
This is the case of Granite Rapids together with its LGA-4710 socket, which, as can be seen in the image that begins this section, appears in two variants. One of them is very reminiscent of AMD’s AM5 but vitaminized. As you can see they are of different sizes and are known as E2A and E2B respectively. It is not the socket that will house the full version of the chip, since said honor will go to the LGA-7529. All this tells us that Granite Rapids could end up being the next generation of the Xeon WS for workstations, but it would not be the only scenario where we will see this chip.
Beechnut City tells us what the servers will be like with Granite Rapids
At the same time, information has been learned from Beechnut City, a complete server created by Intel that serves as a validation platform for servers based on Granite Rapids with LGA-4710 socket. Among its main characteristics we can observe the fact that it has a double socket configuration for two Granite Rapids processors. These CPUs achieve a maximum TDP of up to 350Wand can be accompanied by a DDR5 memory configuration of up to 16 channels and access to a total of 88x PCI-Express 5.0 lanes with support for CXL.
In short, we don’t expect this product to be sold commercially because it is a platform that allows third parties to produce their own motherboards and complete systems. The good thing about all this is that it confirms that Granite Rapids is not suffering the same problems from multiple revisions that Sapphire Rapids had, unless there is some unpleasant surprise at the last minute, everything indicates that this time Intel will be able to meet the times that have been set. proposed.
