Intel announces the new generation of Xeon chips, doubling the number of performance cores. This means that Intel (temporarily) outperforms its main competitor AMD.

Intel wants to turn things around after several difficult years. New chips must show that Intel hasn’t forgotten yet. On Tuesday, Intel announced the new generation of Xeon chips for servers. The sixth generation, also called Granite Rapids, is heralded as the biggest advance in years for Xeon processors.

The Granite Rapids generation are the first Xeon chips to make the jump from the Intel 7 (10 nm) to the Intel 3 process (5 nm). This rolls out the red carpet for doubling the number of P-cores from 64 to a maximum of 128. The Xeon 6 processors are available in various configurations from 72 to 128 cores. The cores are stacked in a “tile architecture”.

Intel claims that the performance is superior to the previous generation. Xeon 6 offers 1.6 times higher performance per watt than Xeon 5. The entire family offers up to 96 PCIe lanes and up to twelve memory channels. Of course, a comparison with AMD cannot be missed: Xeon 6 far exceeds the number of cores of AMD Epyc Genoa (96 cores). AMD will soon get back on par with the Zen 5.

Gaudi 3

Good CPUs alone are no longer enough to score points in data centers. After previous teasers, Intel officially announces Gaudi 3. Gaudi 3 is an “accelerator” for accelerating AI workloads in data centers. The accelerator is equipped with 64 Tensor cores, 128 GB of HBM2e memory and more than 24,000 Gigabit Ethernet.

Gaudi 3 is particularly competitive in terms of price. Intel previously announced that its Gaudi 3 accelerators would sell for $15,000 each. The price is a lot lower than the Nvidia H100, which often costs more than twice as much. Intel finally wants to be competitive in the AI ​​market with lower prices and equivalent performance. From now on, anyone who says AI must also say Intel and not just Nvidia.