Precious “stones”: the price of Intel Xeon Granite Rapids reaches a record $17,800

The cost of the Intel Xeon 6900P processors of the Granite Rapids family, which were officially presented on September 24 of this year, has become known. The price of the chips reaches $17,800 – this is the highest figure for modern products with x86 architecture.

The Xeon 6 Granite Rapids series includes processors with up to 128 cores. The chips carry up to 504 MB of cache on board, and the TDP reaches 500 W. Supports DDR5-6400 and MCR-8800 memory, up to 96 PCIe Gen 5.0/CXL 2.0 lanes and up to 6 UPI 2.0 lanes.

The flagship Xeon 6980P processor with 128 cores is reportedly priced at $17,800 (approximately $139 per core). For comparison, the previous generation chip Xeon Platinum 8592+ (Emerald Rapids) at the start of sales had a price of $11,600 (the special version for life support systems cost $12,400). At the same time, the 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 (Bergamo) was offered immediately after release for $11,900, and the 96-core EPYC 9684X (Genoa-X) for $14,756.

Image Source: Intel

The cost of other representatives of the Intel Xeon 6900P has also been announced. In particular, the 120-core Xeon 6979P is priced at $15,750, which is equivalent to $131 per core. The Xeon 6972P model with 96 cores costs $14,600, or $152 per core. The 72-core Xeon 6960P will cost $13,750 ($191 per core). The Xeon 6952P processor with 96 cores costs $11,400, or $119 per core.

The figures indicated are list prices. It is noted that hyperscalers and large clients receive processors at a price significantly lower than that indicated in the official price lists. The same goes for AMD processors.