Intel Publishes “Granite Rapids-WS” Xeon 600 Turbo Frequencies, AVX-512 and AMX Slash Boost Speeds

In early February, Intel finally updated its HEDT sector with the latest “Granite Rapids-WS” Xeon 600 Series processors for workstations. The company has now published a detailed table of turbo frequencies that provides specifics on each core’s boost frequency in workloads like SSE, AVX2, AVX-512, and AMX, showing how much these workloads allow the CPU cores to boost. This means that during a continuous workload like AMX, these CPUs can only run at a sustained frequency defined in the tables below. At the very top of the new “Granite Rapids-WS” stack is the Xeon 698X, featuring 86 cores and 172 threads, backed by 336 MB of L3 cache. The chip runs at a 2.0 GHz base clock, boosting up to 4.8 GHz with Turbo Boost Max 3.0, or 4.6 GHz under Turbo Boost 2.0. This CPU is fully unlocked, allowing overclocking, which is still relatively rare in the Xeon workstation space.

In non-AVX workloads, this CPU can boost up to 4.8 GHz, while its lowest-performing core, numbered 86, sits at 3.0 GHz. However, AVX2 turbo frequencies cause a significant frequency downgrade, as the base frequency drops to 1.7 GHz, and the slowest core drops to 2.9 GHz when boosting across its 86-core design. Following this are the AVX-512 turbo frequencies, which see this flagship SKU running at a base clock speed of only 1.3 GHz and only 2.5 GHz across its 86 cores. Perhaps the most demanding turbo frequency testing occurs when AMX is enabled, resulting in a base frequency of only 1.1 GHz and only 2.0 GHz across all cores at once. This significant reduction comes from the demanding scenarios of these vector and matrix instruction processing, which are very heavy on the CPU.

More information about other SKUs and details in AVX2, AVX-512, and AMX turbo frequencies follow.