With Intel’s next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors not slated to launch until next year and with AMD EPYC Venice being right around the corner, Intel announced today that with upcoming BIOS updates they will be expanding the range of RDIMM and MRDIMM memory support for current-generation Xeon 6 and Xeon 6+ processors.
As shown in previous Phoronix articles such as DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 Performance With Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids”, there can be massive performance benefits in memory bandwidth intensive applications with going for MRDIMMs over DDR5-6400 as is common for current-generation Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers.
That was with first generation MRDIMM-8800 memory while Intel announced today they will be enabling Gen 2 MRDIMM support for Xeon 6900P processors in Q1-2027. While Gen2 MRDIMMs are expected to boast speeds up to 12,800 MT/s, the Gen 2 MRDIMM support for Xeon 6900P processors will be limited still to 8800 MT/s.
The other portion of Intel’s memory announcement today is that they will be providing Xeon 6700P support for 8000 MT/s RDIMMs in a 1DPC configuration on select SKUs. The RDIMM-8000 memory should provide a nice boost for memory intensive workloads compared to RDIMM-6400 memory with current Xeon 6700P processors. A 25% increase to memory speed while around 6% lower memory latency. A BIOS update for Xeon 6+ and Xeon 6 platforms will enable the 8000 MT/s RDIMM support. That BIOS update should be out in August-September. It’s too bad Intel has not provided any Xeon 6700P series or Xeon 6+ review samples for independent benchmarking yet at the likes of Phoronix… So as it stands now, likely no Phoronix benchmarks of the impact of the upgraded RDIMM-8000 support.
Read more about the upgraded memory options coming to Xeon 6/6+ via the Intel Newsroom.