Intel’s new Xeon 600 processors confirmed to clock up to 4.9GHz

Intel has pulled back the curtain on the frequency behaviour of its new Granite Rapids-WS Xeon 600 workstation series. While marketing materials highlight a peak of 4.9 GHz via Turbo Boost Max 3.0, newly published documentation confirms that sustained speeds are heavily dependent on the instruction set being utilised.

As shared by InstLatX64 (via TechPowerUP), the top-tier SKU in the Xeon 600 Series, the 698X, features 86 cores and 172 threads paired with a massive 336 MB of L3 cache, making it a powerhouse for multi-threaded professional applications. The frequency scaling across different workloads reveals the thermal and power trade-offs required to keep the 86-core silicon stable. In non-AVX workloads, the CPU maintains its peak of 4.8 GHz in single-core mode, but as the active core count increases, the boost frequency can drop to as low as 3.0 GHz. In such workloads, the base frequency is set at 2.0 GHz.

 

Moving on to the AVX-2 instruction set, the CPU can't boost as high, capping at 4.4 GHz in single-core and dropping to 2.9 GHz as the core count increases. In this case, the base frequency is set at 1.7 GHz. In AVX-512, clock frequencies are even lower, with the maximum turbo frequency ranging from 4.2 GHz to 2.5 GHz and the base frequency dropping to 1.3 GHz. Lastly, we have AMX, where the maximum boost frequency drops even further at the lower end, ranging from 4.2 GHz to 2.0 GHz, and the base frequency goes as low as 1.1 GHz.

KitGuru says: Seeing the Xeon 698X drop to nearly 1.1 GHz under heavy AMX workloads might look alarming, but it is standard for chips of this density. Fortunately, this CPU is unlocked, meaning overclocking is a possibility if you want to bump the clock frequencies.

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