Intel Xeon 600 Series: A Serious Return to the High-End Workstation Arena
For several years, Intel’s workstation story felt defensive—incremental core bumps, aging platforms, and a quiet admission that AMD Threadripper Pro owned the “no-compromise” segment. With the official launch of the Xeon 600 series (Granite Rapids-WS), Intel is no longer playing defense.
This is not Sapphire Rapids with a fresh coat of paint. It is a platform reset, explicitly designed to reclaim the single-socket workstation crown.
🧠 Architectural Clarity: All P-Cores, All the Time #
Intel made a deliberate—and revealing—choice with Xeon 600: zero E-cores.
Unlike consumer Core Ultra chips that rely on hybrid scheduling, Granite Rapids-WS uses Redwood Cove P-cores exclusively. For workstation buyers, this matters more than marketing buzzwords. Rendering, simulation, EDA, and scientific workloads care about deterministic latency, uniform cache topology, and predictable scaling—not background efficiency.
Flagship Snapshot #
- Xeon 698X
- 86 cores / 172 threads
- 336 MB shared L3 cache
- Base clock: 2.0 GHz
- Boost: up to 4.8 GHz
- Unlocked multiplier (a rarity for Xeon)
The unlocked 698X is more than a gimmick—it signals Intel’s confidence in power delivery, thermals, and bin quality on Intel 3. This is the closest Intel has come to saying: “Yes, this is an enthusiast chip—just with ECC and 4 TB of RAM.”
⚙️ Platform Muscle: W890 and the Return of Excess I/O #
Workstations live and die by I/O and memory, and this is where Granite Rapids-WS makes its loudest statement.
Core Platform Specs #
| Feature | Xeon 600 (Granite Rapids-WS) | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Process Node | Intel 3 | Major efficiency and density leap |
| Memory Channels | 8-channel DDR5 | Massive bandwidth |
| Max Capacity | Up to 4 TB | Double Threadripper Pro |
| Memory Speed | 6400 MT/s (RDIMM) / 8000 MT/s (MRDIMM) | Bandwidth for AI & simulation |
| PCIe Lanes | Up to 128 PCIe 5.0 | Multi-GPU, NVMe, accelerators |
| CXL | CXL 2.0 | Memory pooling & future expandability |
Intel is clearly targeting AI development workstations, not just traditional CAD boxes. With CXL 2.0 and MRDIMM support, Granite Rapids-WS blurs the line between workstation and single-socket server.
🚀 Performance Reality: Throughput First, Always #
Intel claims up to 61% higher multithreaded performance over the previous Xeon w9-3595X. That number is believable—and meaningful—because the architectural changes go beyond clocks.
Performance Character #
- Single-Thread: ~9% uplift
Respectable, but not the focus. - Multithreaded: Massive gains due to:
- Higher core count
- Larger L3 cache
- Improved memory bandwidth
- AI & HPC:
Granite Rapids-WS doubles down on AVX-512 and AMX, positioning Xeon as a serious local AI training and inference platform.
This is where Intel wants to differentiate from Threadripper Pro: matrix math, inference, simulation, and mixed CPU-AI workloads, not just brute-force ray tracing.
💰 Pricing & Market Positioning #
Intel didn’t price itself out of relevance—another important shift.
| SKU Tier | Cores | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Xeon 634 | 12 | $499 |
| Mid-Range | 32–56 | Competitive with TR Pro |
| Xeon 698X | 86 | $7,699 |
Price-per-core is finally competitive, but Intel’s real advantage is platform density:
- More memory
- More PCIe
- Better AI acceleration per socket
Intel even compared Xeon 600 to consumer Core Ultra parts—an implicit acknowledgment that workstation buyers often cross-shop consumer CPUs. The message is clear: if your workload scales, Core Ultra is a dead end.
🧭 Strategic Context: Why Xeon 600 Matters #
Granite Rapids-WS represents a philosophical reset for Intel:
- No hybrid compromises
- No artificial segmentation
- No pretending consumer chips can replace real workstations
In an era where local AI development, simulation-driven engineering, and content creation at scale are becoming normal—even outside enterprise data centers—Xeon 600 feels timely rather than late.
🏁 Final Verdict #
The Xeon 600 series is Intel’s strongest workstation showing in nearly a decade.
- Against Threadripper Pro 9000:
Intel wins on memory capacity, PCIe density, and AI-centric instructions. - Against its own past:
This is a clean break from conservative, server-only thinking.
For professionals in VFX, EDA, AI research, scientific computing, and high-end engineering, Granite Rapids-WS isn’t just competitive—it’s compelling.
Intel is officially back in the workstation arms race—and this time, it brought everything.