Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids-SP Launching by Year’s End: 64 Cores and 320MB L3 Cache [Report]

After the seemingly neverending delay in the launch of Sapphire Rapids-SP, Intel is in damage control mode. The chipmaker plans to roll out a refresh in the form of Emerald Rapids-SP with increased core counts and a larger cache. Leveraging a mature variant of the Intel 7 process, it’ll feature up to 64 Raptor Cove cores alongside 320MB of L3 cache.

Emerald Rapids-SP will come in 1S and 2S variants, leaving 4S and 8S for Granite Rapids-SP. The primary upgrade comes in the sub-system memory. From just 112.5MB on Sapphire Rapids-SP, Emerald will boast up to 320MB of L3 cache on higher-end models. This can be seen as a direct response to AMD’s Epyc offerings.

AMD’s 64-core Epyc CPUs (9554/9554P) feature 256MB of L3 cache, while the recently launched 96-core Genoa variants top out at 384MB. Granite Rapids-SP should place Intel’s Data Center offerings on par with AMD in the compute (cores) and on-die memory (cache) departments.

With the 5th Gen Xeon Emerald Rapids-SP lineup, Intel will challenge all Epyc Genoa models (barring the 96-core flagship) for the first time since the introduction of Zen-based server processors. Sierra Forest will tackle Bergamo a year after the latter is rolled out.

Genoa and Genoa-X will be followed by Turin, which is said to be a 256-core design. Going by rumors, Granite Rapids won’t exceed 128 cores which means that Intel may not attain parity with its archrival after all.