OpenMetal XL v4 vs XL v5: What Changed

Q: What is the difference between the OpenMetal XL v4 and XL v5?

The XL v5 moves from Intel’s Emerald Rapids platform on Intel 7 to Granite Rapids on Intel 3, paired with DDR5-6400 instead of DDR5-4800 — roughly 33% more memory bandwidth at the same 64-core / 128-thread count.

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Both servers are dual-socket bare metal flagships with 1024 GB of RAM, 25.6 TB of Micron 7500 MAX NVMe data storage, 2x 960 GB RAID 1 boot drives, and 6 Gbps of public bandwidth. The XL v5 doubles LACP-bonded private networking to 40 Gbps (four 10 Gbps NICs) from the XL v4’s 20 Gbps, and its board carries 32 DIMM slots (16 populated to reach 1 TB) versus the XL v4’s 16. The physical envelope is otherwise largely unchanged; what changed most is what runs inside it.

The CPU swap is from 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6530 (Emerald Rapids, Intel 7 process) to 2x Intel Xeon 6530P (Granite Rapids, Intel 3 process). Base clock rises from 2.1 GHz to 2.3 GHz; max turbo from 4.0 GHz to 4.1 GHz. Granite Rapids’ chiplet design and improved IPC are the headline architectural changes, now confirmed on the 6530P at 144 MB total L3 cache, 225 W TDP per socket, and 88 PCIe 5.0 lanes per processor. The memory upgrade from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6400 is the largest practical performance delta — bandwidth-bound workloads like in-memory analytics, dense KVM tenancy, and graph databases were the bottleneck on XL v4 and have meaningful headroom on XL v5.

Intel TDX is enabled by default on both — the 1 TB RAM configuration meets the trust domain threshold on either generation. SGX, AES-NI, AMX, AVX-512, Boot Guard, CET, and TME-MK are present on both. The storage drive model and counts are unchanged. For workloads that were already happy on XL v4, the v5 is a like-for-like replacement with more memory bandwidth; for workloads bottlenecked on RAM throughput, the v5 is a meaningful step up at the same fixed monthly price tier.

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