Intel Xeon 6980P “Granite Rapids” Linux Benchmarks Review

With the Intel Xeon 6900P “Granite Rapids” launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can present staggering leads.

The flagship Intel Xeon 6980P features 128 cores / 256 threads, and a 2.0GHz base clock with 3.2GHz all-core turbo frequency and 3.9GHz maximum turbo frequency. The Xeon 6980P features 504MB of L3 cache and a 500 Watt TDP. As with the rest of the Xeon 6 P-core SKUs, there is support for 12 channel DDR5-6400 memory or MRDIMM 8800MT/s.

For this launch testing of Intel Granite Rapids, Intel kindly supplied the review kit based on their Avenue City reference platform. This Avenue City server shipped with two Xeon 6980P processors and in my review configuration arrived with 24 DIMMs of MRDIMM 8800 MT/s memory. For those interested in DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800 MT/s performance, that will come as a follow-up article as Intel will be sending over the DDR5-6400 memory for comparison shortly.

I am still kicking the tires on this server as unfortunately due to shipping delays this server only arrived toward the end of last week. So it’s been a busy several days of benchmarking. Many more benchmarks are on the way with follow-up articles. I’ll be exploring areas like the SMT/HT performance on Granite Rapids, DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800, SNC3 vs. HEX clustering modes, compiler comparisons, and a variety of other Linux benchmarks from the Xeon 6980P processors.

The Intel AvenueCity reference platform for Granite Rapids does appear to be a lot more nuanced than what we’re typically used to seeing from Intel reference servers. Typically Intel reference servers are of good quality and very robust for being a reference platform. With Avenue City, Intel spent time during briefings in Oregon going over various quirks and warnings: including the suggestion to not even remove the CPUs or RAM until you are done with all planned testing. Thus the lack of Xeon 6980P pictures in this article paired with the limited time ahead of launch. This was quite surprising given that Intel reference servers for years have been rather reliable and not typically prefaced with such warnings. With that said, for this article due to the time constraints and warnings, I am just looking at the Xeon 6980P performance in a dual socket (2P) configuration while as a follow-up article I’ll have single CPU/socket results when getting around to removing the second CPU. Even for these 500 Watt TDP CPUs, AvenueCity is relying just on air cooling but is a 4U server design rather than the more common 2U for reference platforms.

Intel AvenueCity was running OpenBMC as we’ve seen out of recent reference server platforms both from Intel and AMD. With the Avenuecity OpenBMC web interface it’s themed nicely for Intel compared to the stock OpenBMC interface. When talking with Intel’s Ryan Tabrah at the Enterprise Tech Tour, he reinforced that Intel’s big server customers continue to be very interested in open-source firmware and open-source at the lower levels of the system for security and the usual benefits we’ve been touting for years as big open-source firmware proponents.

The past few days of testing the Intel Xeon 6980P has been going well and the Avenue City server behaving. The performance of the Xeon 6980P processors has exceeded my expectations. After years of trailing AMD EPYC for leading performance, the Xeon 6980P showed that Granite Rapids is very capable and can match — and in various cases outperform — current AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo processors.

The generational uplift over the Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids is good to fantastic but then again we’re doubling the core counts going from the Xeon Platinum 8592+ to Xeon 6980P and the big memory bandwidth upgrade with MRDIMMs. The Xeon 6980P was performing very well up against AMD’s current flagship processors the EPYC 9754 128-core Bergamo, EPYC 9654 96-core Genoa, and EPYC 9684X 96-core Genoa-X processors. AMD does have the upcoming 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” processors that is reported for an October launch. It will be very interesting to see how Intel Granite Rapids can compete with those next-gen AMD EPYC Turin processors.

The processors tested for this launch-day testing of Intel Granite Rapids included:

– Xeon Platinum 8380 2P “Ice Lake”

– Xeon Platinum 8490H 2P “Sapphire Rapids”

– Xeon Max 9468 2P “Sapphire Rapids”

– Xeon Max 9480 2P “Sapphire Rapids”

– Xeon Platinum 8592+ 2P “Emerald Rapids”

– Xeon 6766E 2P “Sierra Forest”

– Xeon 6780E 2P “Sierra Forest”

– Xeon 6980P 2P “Granite Rapids”

– EPYC 9654 2P “Genoa”

– EPYC 9684X 2P “Genoa-X”

– EPYC 9754 2P “Bergamo”

All tests were done on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while using a Linux 6.10 kernel and the stock GCC 13 compiler of this Ubuntu Long Term Support release.

All processors were tested with their maximum number of memory channels and at maximum rated speed. As mentioned, the Xeon 6980P were tested using MRDIMM 8800 MT/s while DDR5-6400 Granite Rapids benchmarks will come soon on Phoronix for putting it into perspective how much MRDIMMs are helping the Xeon 6900P performance.

Unfortunately with the Linux kernel tested there was a RAPL/PowerCap regression leading to inaccurate CPU power readings on Granite Rapids. Due to only noticing after completing the Granite Rapids run and the limited time for testing ahead of launch, today’s article will lack the customary CPU power and performance-per-Watt metrics. I’m working on the Granite Rapids CPU power efficiency metrics for a follow-up article in the coming days on Phoronix. Apologies for not having power numbers to share today due to the last minute issue and the limited amount of pre-launch testing time.