The present study aims at developing the high speed steel (HSS) as roll materials to replace the traditional roll materials such as the alloy cast iron and powder metallurgical (PM) hard alloy. The HSS roll billet was formed by centrifugal casting, and the billet was rough machined after soften annealing heat treatment, then it was quenched and tempered to get suitable hardness and toughness. After that the HSS roll was finish machined to the final dimension of φ285 mm in the outer diameter, φ160 mm in the inner diameter and 120 mm in width and its surface hardness was tested. Finally the HSS roll was used in high speed wire rod mill. The test results show that a high and homogeneous hardness can obtain on the work surface of HSS rolls, the surface hardness is 63-65HRC and its variation is smaller than 2HRC. The impact toughness of this kind of HSS is about 16 J/cm². The results of on-line service investigation in high speed wire rod mill indicate that the HSS rolls have excellent wear resistance, the steel rolling quantity per mm of HSS rolls is 3120 t, the service life-span of HSS rolls is 4 times longer than that of high chromium cast iron rolls and it is close to that of the PM hard alloy rolls. The manufacturing burden of HSS rolls is obviously lower than that of the PM hard alloy rolls, it is only 25% of that of the PM hard alloy rolls.