Intel’s next Xeon 7 chip has surfaced with 32 cores and a fat 240MB of L3 cache on 18A-P.
Chipzilla’s Diamond Rapids family is meant to be the next big shove for its data centre ambitions. The chips are expected to scale up to 192 cores, with PCIe Gen6 and 16-channel memory support.
The silicon was spotted by Momomo_US in SiSoftware running on an Oakstream reference platform codenamed Johnson City. The listing showed a “Genuine Intel(R) 0000” part.
The Diamond Rapids-P sample had 32 cores, 64MB of L2 cache and 240MB of L3 cache. It was ticking along at just 1.1GHz, so nobody should start writing victory banners yet.
That low clock suggests an early engineering sample rather than something close to retail. Still, it shows Chipzilla has 18A-P silicon alive and shuffling around its test labs.
The 18A-P process is a tweaked version of 18A, using the same gate-all-around and backside power delivery foundations. Chipzilla claims it can deliver nine per cent more performance at the same power, or 18 per cent lower power at the same performance.
It brings Power Boost, a dual-contact trick enabled by PowerVia backside power delivery for NMOS and PMOS transistors. The point is better performance without making the footprint swell like a datacentre power bill.
Johnson City supports CPUs up to 650W, while Oakridge uses the massive LGA 9324 socket. That should give server board makers plenty of room to build something expensive and hot.
The 240MB L3 cache figure sounds chunky, although Chipzilla has already offered up to 288MB on its Granite Rapids Xeon 6730P. AMD offers up to 256MB of L3 cache on its 32-core EPYC 9005 chips, so the cache willy-waving is far from settled.
Diamond Rapids will have to scrap with AMD’s Zen 6 EPYC Venice and Verano families. Those are expected to scale to 256 cores on TSMC’s 2nm process, which makes Chipzilla’s comeback pitch look a little sweatier.
Chipzilla is expected to lean on performance per dollar with Xeon 7, while Coral Rapids waits in the wings with SMT support returning. For now, Diamond Rapids has appeared in the wild, but AMD still looks annoyingly comfortable in the server CPU fight.
