An early Intel W890 motherboard has surfaced, giving us the clearest look yet at the upcoming Granite Rapids-WS workstation platform. The board is the ADLINK ISB-W890, a CEB-size server/workstation design built around Intel's new Socket E2 and the 6th-gen Granite Rapids-WS Xeon. It lines up cleanly with the recent W890 platform leak , confirming most of the high-level specs. The ISB-W890 supports one Granite Rapids-WS CPU with overclocking and VROC capability. Intel's new platform brings a quad-channel DDR5 memory controller with eight RDIMM slots, supporting up to 1 TB of ECC DDR5 at speeds up to 6400 MT/s (1DPC). This matches earlier W890 documentation that highlighted a major increase in memory bandwidth and capacity over the previous W680 workstation platform.

PCIe connectivity mirrors Intel's split "Expert" and "Mainstream" lane configurations. The Expert-tier layout exposes up to 128 lanes through a mix of PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 4.0, while Mainstream reduces that to 80 lanes. ADLINK's board offers seven PCIe slots including three x16 slots, plus MCIO connectors for additional high-speed expansion. Storage support is equally impressive: two M.2 NVMe slots (up to 110 mm and 110/151 mm), two SlimSAS ports fed directly by the W890 chipset, and eight SATA III ports. Networking includes 1 GbE and 2.5 GbE Intel controllers, with full IPMI management through an AST2600 BMC. Rear I/O is stacked with USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a COM port, VGA and DP outputs from the BMC, and dual Ethernet.