Intel Xeon 6900P Reasserts Intel Server Leadership

That one is partly hardware refresh cycles. First gen epyc was a bit unknown and not totally compelling, was probably Rome that took the lead comprehensively. Then maybe five years to work through the pipeline of people having bought machines recently enough that they aren't replacing them yet.

It's client where Intel is really pushing the boundaries of acceptable corporate behaviour. The laptop/corporate-desktop sector is very intel dominated despite the cpus being much worse for a long time, and that looks suspiciously like an influence over oems and retailers thing. Roughly what they were fined for doing a while back.

So Intel needs 40% more power for 10-20% more performance? Cool story, bro.

And AMD is about to release something even faster.

Also, 6980 has 128 cores over 96 cores in the old Epyc 9754.

Next month AMD will launch their current generation, which will also have 128 cores in their model competing with 6980 (and 192 cores in the model competing with Sierra Forest).

Intel has chosen well to do the Granite Rapids launch a few weeks earlier than expected, so that they can be compared only with the old AMD CPUs.

Granite Rapids will have the advantage over AMD Turin to use some non-standard memory modules "MCR DIMM" (Multiplexer Combined Ranks DIMM), originally developed by Hynix, but now also made by Micron, which have higher throughput than the standard DDR5 memories.

There is a pending JEDEC standard for a similar kind of memories (MRDIMMs, multiplexed rank buffered DIMMs), which is slightly different from what Granite Rapids uses now. AMD will support MRDIMMs eventually, but presumably only in future CPUs, because the JEDEC standard is not finalized.

For additional confusion, Intel and Micron have renamed "MCR DIMM" into MRDIMM, to match the name of the standard JEDEC memory, even if their specifications are different.

Therefore the MRDIMMs for Intel will not be usable in different computers, e.g. in those with AMD CPUs, even when AMD will begin to support MRDIMMs.

While Granite Rapids will have the advantage of faster non-standard memory (presumably also more expensive), it will have the disadvantage of using obsolete Redwood Cove cores, like those of Meteor Lake but with the server features added to them, e.g. AVX10.1/512 and AMX, while AMD Turin will have up-to-date Zen 5 cores, which have a significantly higher IPC (perhaps by 15%) than the Redwood Cove cores.

For AI/ML applications, Granite Rapids will be superior, due to the AMX instruction set extension, which offers features similar to the "tensor cores" of the NVIDIA GPUs. AMX is the most important part of the Intel ISA for server CPUs that is not available yet in the AMD CPUs.

Sadly, that kind of price competition will not be seen by most HEDT users.

I mean, of course I want a machine with something like that. It's only that I can't possibly justify buying one (even if a floor-standing tower server with one of those chips existed, which also won't happen).

BTW, someone should make a good looking, cooling-friendly, floor standing rack conversion kit. The ones I found are criminally ugly.