Intel’s latest flagship 128-core Xeon CPU costs $17,800 — Granite Rapids sets a new high watermark

When Intel formally introduced its Xeon 6 6900-series ‘Granite Rapids’ on September 24, it didn’t announce pricing, which was a bit surprising. However, after some prodding, the company has now added pricing to its Ark database. As it turns out, Intel’s flagship Xeon 6980P processor with 128 high-performance cores costs $17,800, the highest pricing we’ve seen for a modern x86 CPU — significantly more than AMD’s EPYC ‘Genoa’ 9654 offering with 96 cores, which costs $11,805.

In fact, at $17,800, Intel’s Xeon 6980P is the most expensive standard CPU launched in recent years. Intel could not match AMD in terms of core count and multi-thread performance for years, so it didn’t give its chips extreme price tags over the last few years. By contrast, AMD needed to grab market share away from Intel, so while its EPYC processors were expensive, they were not that expensive.  

Formally, Intel’s 28-core Xeon Scalable 8280L (with support for up to 4.5TB of DDR4-2933 memory, an amount that even Xeon 6980P cannot handle) launched at $17,906 in Q2 2019, but got a price cut to $14,898 shortly thereafter.

Around the same time, Intel also released its 56-core Xeon Platinum 9282 ‘Cascade Lake-AP’ CPU that got close to AMD’s EPYC in terms of core count, but it was only available to select OEMs and came in a BGA package. So, it was not exactly a widely available model, and public pricing information was never provided. Yet, given that the regular 28-core Xeon Scalable 8280 was priced at $11,460 and the model 9282 was essentially two 8280 pieces of silicon in a single package, the Xeon Platinum 9282 was probably priced accordingly — it was likely more expensive than the Xeon 6980P for those server makers that used it. 

In addition to the range-topping Xeon 6980P processor, there are three more Granite Rapids CPU models in the 6900-series range, and they are comparatively quite costly, too. 

The 120-core Xeon 6979P has a recommended customer price of $15,750. More interesting is that Intel’s 96-core Xeon 6972P carries a price tag of $14,600, which is $2,795 more than AMD’s 96-core EPYC 9654. Moving down the ladder, there is the 72-core Xeon 6960P for $13,750, which is again more expensive than AMD’s EPYC 9654 despite featuring significantly fewer cores. 

The only Granite Rapids processor that is cheaper than the AMD EPYC 9654 is Intel’s 96-core Xeon 6952P with relatively low base clocks. Indeed, given its specifications, this CPU looks very competitive. 

However, we’ll need to wait for AMD’s coming Zen 5 server chips to assess Intel’s competitive positioning. Those chips will be released next week.