Xeon 6 at the edge: Intel Granite Rapids-D will support PCIe 5.0, 2x100GbE, DDR5-5600 and MCR-DIMM

Intel has revealed some technical specifications of the 6th generation Xeon SoC Granite Rapids-D, designed for edge solutions, including those based on the Intel Tiber Edge platform. Products using a chiplet layout will appear on the market in 2025.

The processors are based on powerful Redwood Cove P-cores. Each core received 64 KB of L1 cache for instructions and data, as well as a 2 MB L2 cache. The SoC design includes one or two compute tiles, as well as an input/output (I/O) tile responsible for implementing PCIe, CXL, and various auxiliary accelerators. Computing units are produced using the Intel 3 technical process, IO tiles are produced using the Intel 4 technical process. The tiles are “stitched” using EMIB.

Image Source: Intel

Xeon 6 Granite Rapids-D will be available in versions with support for four (2DPC) and eight memory channels. The dimensions of BGA packages are 77.5 × 50 mm and 77.5 × 56.5 mm, respectively. There is talk of support for DDR5-5600 m MCR-DIMM, 32 PCIe 5.0 lanes, 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes and 16 CXL 2.0 lanes. Up to eight 1/10/25GbE Ethernet ports, up to four 50GbE ports, or two 100GbE ports can be used. The Ethernet controller supports packet classification and ACL processing, offers various schedulers and the ability to programmable traffic processing.

The capabilities of Intel QAT (Quick Assist Technology) have also been significantly expanded. Firstly, QAT now includes a media accelerator for processing streaming video on the fly: (de-)encoding and transcoding, scaling, cropping, etc. There is talk of at least 1080p@30 support for AVC/HEVC/AV1. If necessary, the video stream can be immediately directed to processor cores with AMX. Secondly, it became possible to compress and encrypt data in one pass while simultaneously checking its integrity.

Image Source: Intel

The chips also received support for Intel DLB (Dynamic Load Balancer), Intel vRAN Boost, Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions), Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions). In addition, the capabilities of the Intel RDT (Resource Director Technology) function have been significantly expanded, which now allows you to monitor and manage the status of IO devices, including PCIe, CXL, integrated accelerators, etc.

Built-in AI capabilities deliver over 8x faster performance in Resnet-50 and over 6x faster performance in Visual Transformer compared to the previous generation Xeon D 2899NTN (with AVX512 VNNI) thanks to new AMX instructions. Operation in FP16 mode is supported.

Intel has not yet disclosed the maximum number of processing cores for the Xeon 6 Granite Rapids-D. But during the presentation, a variant with 42 cores was mentioned, working in conjunction with 128 GB of DDR5-5600/4800 memory. The processors will be offered in versions optimized for computing workloads and edge applications with AI functions.