Intel announces two Xeon processor series codenamed Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids-D at MWC in Barcelona.

Intel will show two new Xeon families at MWC in Barcelona: Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids-D. The manufacturer has been talking about both chips since August last year, but is now providing further details.

Sierra forest

Sierra Forest, for example, is scheduled to launch in the second half of this year. Sierra Forest is a special type of Xeon chip aimed at workloads that primarily benefit from lots of cores rather than high-performance cores. For this purpose, these chips contain up to 288 computing cores, although these are not P-cores like conventional Xeon chips. Instead, Intel fills the chips with more efficient E-cores. The chip will be particularly relevant in the cloud context.

Since Intel is talking about the Xeon processor at the Mobile World Congress, the chip specialist naturally emphasizes that the processor is ideal for 5G core workloads. Intel speaks of 2.7 times more performance compared to the 2021 Xeon generation.

Granite Rapids-D

Then we continue to Granite Rapids, more precisely to Granite Rapids-D. These chips come with an AI sauce and have a so-called vRAN Boost on board. This should once again be attractive for telecommunications providers. The vRAN boost ensures that operators can serve users in their wireless networks more efficiently. Like last year, Intel wants to highlight its Xeon chips as CPUs for telecom backends.

Granite Rapids-D is a variant of Granite Rapids for servers. These chips are scheduled for release in 2024, but the D version will have to wait until sometime in 2025.