Intel's most powerful CPU ever may have been spotted - 86-core Granite Rapids-WS has a 4.8GHz base speed and will give AMD's ThreadRipper HEDT a run for its money

Intel in 2017

  • Intel Granite Rapids-WS listing spotted online shows 86 cores with 172 threads
  • Benchmark entry hints at 4.8GHz turbo boost speeds on limited cores
  • Granite Rapids-WS could be a serious challenger to AMD Threadripper

Intel is on something of a roll at the moment, with major investments from the US government and Nvidia, plus potential future interest from other members of the Magnificent 7 - and now, a new benchmark listing may have revealed its most ambitious workstation chip yet.

Hardware leaker @momomo_us on X spotted an OpenBenchmarking.org entry showing an “Intel 0000” Granite Rapids-WS processor configured with 86 cores and 172 threads.

The entry shows clock speeds reaching 4.8GHz, although this is likely a turbo figure for a small number of cores rather than an all-core base.

Granite Rapids-WS processor listing

(Image credit: OpenBenchmarking.org / @momomo_us)

Taking on AMD’s Threadripper

Key details, including thermal design power and full platform specifications, were not provided, so the submission should be treated as an early leak rather than confirmation of the final specs.

TechPowerUp says Granite Rapids-WS is derived from Intel’s XCC server compute dies, which combine two compute tiles for the 86 cores alongside two I/O tiles for PCIe and memory connectivity.

Reaching higher core counts would probably require Intel’s larger UCC die and a bigger package.

Memory support for this workstation SKU is not yet known either.

The server-grade XCC family supports DDR5-6400, with higher speeds possible using MR-DIMMs, and a workstation variant could adopt an eight-channel layout to balance capacity against board complexity.

Cooling requirements also remain a mystery, as no base clock or thermal envelope was listed.

The test system, shown in the OpenBenchmarking.org entry (which you can see above), included 512GB of memory, a 1TB Seagate ZP1000GM3004 SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6.

The system also reported use of GCC 11.5.0, GNOME Shell 40.10, and an X Server display driver.

Intel has recently scaled back its high-end desktop focus, leaving professionals to choose between older workstation parts or AMD’s offerings.

If the details are accurate, Granite Rapids-WS could provide Intel with a fast route back into the HEDT and workstation segment, where AMD’s Threadripper has dominated.

For OEMs and creators, real-world adoption of Granite Rapids-WS will hinge on final performance, efficiency, software scalability, and how convincingly the chip challenges AMD’s Threadripper dominance.

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Wayne Williams
Editor

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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